| Abstract |
Breast cancer is a heterogenous disease, composed of tumour cells with
differing gene expressions and phenotypes. Tumour heterogeneity has
several important consequences for breast cancer including: (i) making
classification by morphological and expression analysis more difficult
because of the diversity within single tumours with the consequence that
the majority of cells of the tumour will dominate this classification
whether or not these cells are critical for diagnosis or treatment; (ii)
treatments may fail to eradicate tumours simply by failing to eliminate
one of the cell subtypes within the tumour; and (iii) differing abilities
of the cell subtypes for dissemination and metastasis. Recently, a rare
subpopulation of cells within tumours has been described with the ability
to initiate and sustain tumour growth, to resist traditional therapies and
to allow for secondary tumour dissemination. These cells are termed tumour-
initiating cells or cancer stem cells, or alternatively, in the case of
breast cancer, breast cancer stem cells. The therapeutic targeting of
these cells has the potential to eliminate residual disease and may become
an important component of a multi-modality treatment of cancer. Presented
here is an investigation into: (i) ways to functionally and phenotypically
identify breast cancer stem cells; (ii) the role of breast cancer stem
cells in disease from both clinical samples and using xenograft assays;
and (iii) the potential to target these cells.
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