Cancer progression involves the gradual loss of a differentiated phenotype and acquisition of progenitor and stem-cell-like features. Here, we provide novel stemness indices for assessing the degree of oncogenic dedifferentiation. We used an innovative one-class logistic regression (OCLR) machine-learning algorithm to extract transcriptomic and epigenetic feature sets derived from non-transform...

The feature of oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSCC) is commonly metastasizing to locoreginal lymph nodes, and the involvement of lymph nodes metastasis represents the one of important prognostic factors of poor clinical outcome. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to be key players of cancer-related hallmarks including cancer stemness, EMT (epithelial-mesenchymal transition), and metastaisis. He...

Stem cell (SC) research holds the promise of controlling and/or curing a variety of diseases. SC applications include cell therapy, disease modeling, and developmental biology. This commentary focuses on an important study that examined Notch signaling in murine satellite muscle SCs (Lin et al., 2013). The results highlight the possible serious side effects of NOTCH inhibitors, a class of targe...

Cancer cells with stem cell characteristics are harbored by most tumors, and are characterized by epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) - which promotes invasive growth and metastasis - chemoresistance, and the capacity to reconstitute new tumors. Hence, the control or destruction of cancer stem cells should be a major goal of cancer management. The let-7 family of microRNAs has cancer suppre...

Metastasis of carcinoma involves migration of tumor cells to distant organs and initiate secondary tumors. Migration requires a complete or partial Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT), and tumor-initiation requires cells possessing stemness. Epithelial cells (E) undergoing a complete EMT to become mesenchymal (M) have been suggested to be more likely to possess stemness. However, recent ...

Cancer stem cell survival is the leading factor for tumor recurrence after tumor-suppressive treatments. Therefore, specific and efficient inhibitors of cancer stemness must be discovered for reducing tumor recurrence. YM155 has been indicated to significantly reduce stemness-derived tumorsphere formation. However, the pharmaceutical mechanism of YM155 against cancer stemness is unclear. This s...

Abstract Gliomas are the most common central nervous system neoplasm and despite past significant progress, its diagnostics faces suboptimal classification which impacts patient management. The stem cell-like phenotype of various cancers is correlated with worst overall prognosis. We propose a Stemness prediction model based on gene expression signatures neural progenitors that can be used to m...