Overview: Cancer Stem Cells

Cancer has become a global issue and retains a central place in fatality rates among the wide variety of diseases known the world over, and the conventional synthetic medicaments, albeit used until now, produce numerous side effects. This abnormal growth of cancer leads to a condition called metastasis. Thus, the potential invasion and metastasization of cancer cells to other distant organs are driven by three distant factors namely tumor microenvironment of Cancer Stem Cells (CSC), the molecular mechanism of cell survival pathways, and EMT. Cancer stem cells are a class of pluripotent cells that are observed in most solid and hematological cancers types representing small proportions of total cells in given tumors that have resistance to chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Thus, it is necessary to understand the tumor microenvironment and hallmarks of cancer for developing a successful therapeutic approach to cancer treatment. Though there is the development of numerous chemotherapeutic drugs for cancer, fatality rate of cancer is still not up to mark. Thus researchers made their focus on major causes of drug resistance. Thus, the concept of stem cells in cancer research has drawn attention in recent years by elucidating their role in maintaining the tumor microenvironment, modulating signaling pathways, and also in epithelial to mesenchymal. The current chapter in this book gives an overall view of cancer stem cells, different aspects of cancer stem cells, the EMT mechanism of cancer stem cells, therapeutic resistance, their isolation characterization, and their therapeutic implications for targeted therapy by adopting a well-defined scientific perspective.