Breast cancer stem cells and cellomics

Abstract

Omics technologies are powerful high-throughput analytic tools to get inside whole-system level alterations of cancer cells. Since cancer stem cells are groups of vital cells in heterogeneous tumor populations, their omics analysis will enable better understanding in most controversial issues. These issues are mostly treatment resistance and metastatic ability of tumors. The relation between breast cancer patients' survival rates and stem cells in breast tumor has revealed the significance of breast cancer stem cells. The high tumor-forming capacity of these stem cells makes it necessary to get more comprehensive insight about their biology. Genomics, proteomics, and epigenomics are helpful tools for this purpose. The general step of these high-throughput methods is the isolation of breast cancer stem cells based on specific markers. Another shared feature of these omics approaches is to use a large set of interested genes, transcripts, or proteins. In addition to these two common key features, the remaining experimental setups may change from one to another omics analysis. The outcome of these approaches can yield some signatures, which will be mostly critical for later therapeutic strategies. Taken altogether, omics approaches not only reveal comprehensive understanding about breast cancer stem cells but also open the doors to more effective targeted therapies.