Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a highly heterogeneous type of tumor, which may be caused by the stem/progenitor cell features of particular HCC cells. Recent studies have subclassified HCC into different prognostic subtypes according to just one stemness-associated marker. However, one stemness-associated marker is not sufficient to clearly define cancer stem cells, or to decipher the hetero...

UNLABELLED There is a recently proposed subtype of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) that is histologically similar to usual HCC, but characterized by the expression of "stemness"-related markers. A large-scale study on two different cohorts of HCCs was performed to investigate the clinicopathologic features and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT)-related protein expression status of this subt...

BACKGROUND Head and Neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is a human lethal cancer with clinical, pathological, phenotypical and biological heterogeneity. Caner initiating cells (CICs), which are responsible for tumor growth and coupled with gain of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), have been identified. Previously, we enriched a subpopulation of head and neck cancer initiating cells (HN-...

Inadequate cell numbers in culture is one of the hurdles currently delaying the application of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) for transplantation therapy. Nanofibrous scaffolds have been effectively used to expand and differentiate non-colony forming multipotent mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) for the repair of tissues or organs. In the present study, we evaluated the influence of nanofibrous ...