Narrow Results

Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs) are a small population of cells within tumors holding stemness properties that sustain cancer progression, such as enhanced capacities for self-renewal, growing, metastasizing, homing, and reproliferating. CSCs show remarkable organizing capacities as they can educate neighboring cells to provide nutrients and collaborate in the elusion from the immune system, creating an environment favorable for tumor growth. In particular, tumor-specific microenvironments comprise stromal cells, immune cells, networks of cytokines and growth factors, hypoxic regions, and the extracellular matrix. The contribution of the microenvironment in this picture is crucial: it is now accepted that the “cancer” scenario is not simply composed of transformed cells working together in isolated and strictly autonomous machinery. Tumor microenvironment actively collaborates with neoplastic cells at different levels: promoting proliferation while evading growth suppression and immune surveillance, overcoming cell death, modulating cell metabolism, activating angiogenesis and invasion/metastasis programs. Also, the interactions between CSC and microenvironment help in their survival of common anti-cancer therapies thus being partly responsible for disease recurrence. Further studies regarding CSC/microenvironment seem to be promising for new CSC-targeting therapies, which may represent an innovative strategy for the cure of lung cancer.