Cancer Stem Cell’s Potential Clinical Implications

Abstract

Context: To date, CSCs have been identified in a variety of hematopoietic and solid tumors. Applying CSC in clinical implication still depends on future studies to remove complexities including CSC heterogeneity and CSC similarity to normal stem cells. However, several potential clinical applications including therapeutic, diagnostic and prognostic implications have been introduced for cancer stem cells (CSC). In this review, we discuss previously considered and unconsidered potential clinical application of CSCs including how CSCs could be applied for pan-specific cancer screening and therapy. Evidence Acquisition: We will first discuss the previously proposed CSC clinical implications using a brief review of the literature. Subsequently, we will discuss some theoretical potential CSC implications which have not been discussed before including pan-specific cancer screening and therapy, and present confirmatory references for each part of our hypothesis. Results: We hypothetically demonstrated the presence of similar markers in the CSC subset of different tumors and introduced it as a way to simultaneously screen several cancers using one CSC marker. Conclusions: Simultaneous screening of several cancers applying one CSC marker could be regarded as a novel high-value cost-conscious cancer screening approach which might evolve cancer screening concept. However, this application remains to be explored in the future instigations.