The correlation of hematopoietic stem cells with cancer stem cells through the regulation of stromal cells in tumor microenvironment

Abstract

Cancer stem cells are a small population of tumor cells that have many malignant features such as chemotherapy resistance, radiotherapy resistance, tumorigenicity and are responsible for tumor progression, disease recurrence and metastasis. Therefore, insight into the regulation of the biology of cancer stem cells is important to eradicate cancer. Recently, studies suggested that hematopoietic stem cells could incorporate into tumor stroma and differentiated into stromal cells and the cells derived from hematopoietic stem cells play an important role on tumor progress. Moreover, cancer cells competed with hematopoietic stem cells for occupancy of the hematopoietic stem cell niches to regulate bone metastasis and most cancer cells in bone marrow metastasis were cancer stem cells. Therefore, we hypothesize that cancer stem cells could promote hematopoietic stem cells incorporating into tumor microenvironment and resulting into transformation of hematopoietic stem cells to stromal cells, which could impact the biological behavior of cancer stem cells.