Cancer Stem Cells Targeting; the Lessons from the Interaction of the Immune System, the Cancer Stem Cells and the Tumor Niche

Abstract

Failure of treatment strategies against cancers is a major issue engaging many scientists to investigate the possible resistance factors. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) subvert promising therapeutic methods by developing resistant cancers. These pluripotent cells are located in individual microenvironments called cancer niche. CSCs affect the immune cells and on the flip side, the immune cells in the cancer niche influence them. Thereby, the interaction between CSCs and immune cells in cancer niche needs to be clearly studied in order to develop novel efficient methods of immune-based cancer treatment. In this article, we review literature about the suggested methods of CSC escape from immune responses and the effect of cancer niche characteristics on the ability of CSCs to develop resistant strains of cancers. Moreover, we discuss immune-mediated tumor targeting methods and bring in trials focused on CSC targeted therapies. We aim to help physicians to reach a consensus about using CSC-targeted immunotherapy methods and emerge novel immunotherapy methods through disrupting the interaction between immune cells and CSCs in the tumor microenvironment.

Keywords:

• Cancer stem cell
• immune system
• immune targeting
• tumor niche

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank of Seyyed Mehdi Hosseini for designing the figure.

Declaration of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a grant provided by Royan Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Technology.