Research Progress of the Relationship between Cancer Stem Cells and Endometrial Cancer

ZOU Ya-ting; CHEN Qing

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1674-1870.2017.01.008

Abstract：Endometrial carcinoma, which is one of the three most common gynecologic malignant tumors, severely threatens women′s health, and its incidence is showing an increasing trend in recent years. The deep researchs of pathogenesis and typing of endometrial carcinoma are aimed at finding new effective treatment methods, in which the proposal of cancer stem cell concept has offer new therapeutic strategy for oncotherapy. Cancer stem cells are defined as a subset of cancer cells with abilities of self-renewal, unlimited proliferation, multipotential differentiation and high tumorigenicity. Current emerging evidences indicate that the cancer stem cells are likely responsible for the development, progression, metastasis and recurrence of endometrial carcinoma. These may be the main reasons for the poor prognosis. According to the endometrial cancer stem cell surface markers (such as CD133, CD44, etc.) or cell biological characteristics (such as side population cell sorting), cancer stem cells are separated and purified. In addition, using high expression of ALDH1 and Musashi-1 in endometrial cancer stem cells to identify cancer stem cells in the tumor tissues, which provides the probability of radical curing cancers through the targeted killing of cancer stem cells. This review is a report of literatures of the sources and characters of cancer stem cells, and their special surface markers in endometrial carcinoma.