Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy

Biography

Biography: Annie Agnes Suganya S

Abstract

Recurrence is a major reason for mortality in many forms of cancer including oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). It is explained that CSCs, possessing self-renewal ability and resistance to therapy survive the treatment and recreate tumor after the withdrawal of the treatment. The notion that CSCs possess self-renewal property as well as chemoresistance stems from the fact that CSCs isolated based on one of the CSC markers or sphere culture enriching CSCs exhibit increased self-renewal ability and chemoresistance than their counterparts. Majority of cancer researchers treat drug selected cells as CSCs and it has been shown that important signaling pathways regulate both chemoresistance and self-renewal ability. Our first attempt was to analyze whether these two properties are interdependent using oral cancer cell lines and primary OSCC samples. Even though all the cancer stem cells are not chemoresistant, we show that the cells possessing both self-renewal ability and chemoresistance are responsible for cancer recurrence. Further, we provide evidences for the induction of self-renewal ability in chemoresistant cells by microenvironment using co-culture system and 3D-coculture systems. Our study proves that signaling pathways that induce of self-renewal ability in chemoresistant cells play a major role in recurrence after chemotherapy. The present study implies that targeting signaling pathways that impart self-renewal ability in chemoresistant cells may improve the therapeutic outcome.