The cancer stem cell hypothesis poses that the bulk of differentiated cells are non-tumorigenic and only a subset of cells with self-renewal capabilities drive tumor initiation and progression. This means that differentiation could have a tumor-suppr...
Natural killer (NK) cells are critical immune components in controlling tumor growth and dissemination. Given their innate capacity to eliminate tumor cells without prior sensitization, NK-based therapies for cancer are actively pursued pre-clinicall...
During tumor progression, hypoxia, nutrient deprivation or changes in the extracellular environment (i.e., induced by anti-cancer drugs) elicit adaptive responses in cancer cells. Cellular plasticity increases the chance that tumor cells may survive...
Mortality remains alarmingly high for patients diagnosed with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), with 93% succumbing to the disease within five years. The vast majority of PDAC cases are driven by activating mutations in the proto-oncogene KRAS...
Cellular plasticity is a phenomenon where cells adopt different identities during development and tissue homeostasis as a response to physiological and pathological conditions. This review provides a general introduction to processes by which cells c...
Neuroendocrine plasticity and treatment-induced neuroendocrine phenotypes have recently been proposed as important resistance mechanisms underlying prostate cancer progression. Treatment-induced neuroendocrine prostate cancer (t-NEPC) is highly aggre...
The tropism of ovarian cancer (OvCa) to the peritoneal cavity is implicated in widespread dissemination, suboptimal surgery, and poor prognosis. This tropism is influenced by stromal factors that are not only critical for the oncogenic and metastatic...
Cancer stem cells (CSCs), a subpopulation of tumor cells with self-renewal capacity, have been associated with tumor initiation, progression, and therapy resistance. While the bulk of tumor cells mainly use glycolysis for energy production, CSCs have...
Tumor heterogeneity is considered the major cause of treatment failure in current cancer therapies. This feature of solid tumors is not only the result of clonal outgrowth of cells with genetic mutations, but also of epigenetic alterations induced by...
Modulation of autophagy as an anticancer strategy has been widely studied and evaluated in several cell models. However, little attention has been paid to the metabolic changes that occur in a cancer cell when autophagy is inhibited or induced. In th...
The connection between epithelial-mesenchymal (E-M) plasticity and cancer stem cell (CSC) properties has been paradigm-shifting, linking tumor cell invasion and metastasis with therapeutic recurrence. However, despite their importance, the molecular...
The epithelial–mesenchymal plasticity (EMP) is a process by which epithelial cells acquire the ability to dynamically switch between epithelial and mesenchymal phenotypic cellular states. Epithelial cell plasticity in the context of an epitheli...
Cancer metabolism is a hallmark of cancer. Metabolic plasticity defines the ability of cancer cells to reprogram a plethora of metabolic pathways to meet unique energetic needs during the various steps of disease progression. Cell state transitions a...
An increasing body of evidence suggests that cancer stem cells (CSCs) utilize reprogrammed metabolic strategies to adapt to a hostile tumor microenvironment (TME) for survival and stemness maintenance. Such a metabolic alteration in CSCs is facilitat...
Ovarian Cancer is the fifth most common cancer in females and remains the most lethal gynecological malignancy as most patients are diagnosed at late stages of the disease. Despite initial responses to therapy, recurrence of chemo-resistant disease i...
Tumor heterogeneity poses one of the greatest challenges to a successful treatment of cancer. Tumor cell populations consist of different subpopulations that have distinct phenotypic and genotypic profiles. Such variability poses a challenge in succe...
Properly timed addition and removal of histone 3 lysine 27 tri-methylation (H3K27me3) is critical for enabling proper differentiation throughout all stages of development and, likewise, can guide carcinoma cells into altered differentiation states wh...
Lineage plasticity, the ability of cancer cells to alter their differentiated state through transcriptional and epigenetic reprogramming, has emerged as a key mechanism of therapeutic resistance across cancers. This adaptive process can manifest in m...
The human breast gland is a unique organ as most of its development occurs postnatally between menarche and menopause, a period ranging from 30 to 40 years. During this period, the monthly menstruation cycle drives the mammary gland through phases of...
There is ample evidence that, instead of a binary switch, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in cancer results in a flexible array of phenotypes, each one uniquely suited to a stage in the invasion-metastasis cascade. The phenotypic plasticity o...
Follicular-cell-derived thyroid cancers that progress from differentiated tumors to poorly differentiated or anaplastic states commonly lose thyroid lineage identity, radioiodine avidity, and favorable clinical behavior. Genetic and signaling alterat...
Aerobic glycolysis, also referred to as the Warburg effect, has been regarded as the dominant metabolic phenotype in cancer cells for a long time. More recently, it has been shown that mitochondria in most tumors are not defective in their ability to...
Cancer stem cells (CSCs) drive therapeutic resistance and tumor relapse by exploiting redundant regulatory networks that integrate Wnt/β-catenin, Notch, and Hedgehog signaling with metabolic reprogramming, epigenetic plasticity, and tumor microe...
Cancer cell plasticity, defined as the ability of tumor cells to reversibly adopt distinct functional states, plays a central role in tumor heterogeneity, therapy resistance, and disease relapse. This process enables cells to enter stem-like, dormant...
The adenoma-to-carcinoma progression in colon cancer is driven by a sequential accumulation of genetic alterations at specific tumor suppressors and oncogenes. In contrast, the multistage route from the primary site to metastasis formation is underli...
Mitochondria play a central role in energy metabolism, redox homeostasis, and signal transduction in the thyroid cells. Increasing evidence indicates that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations, copy number variations, and haplogroup-specific polymorphi...
Brain tumors, particularly glioblastoma, remain among the most lethal cancers, with limited survival benefits from current genetic and molecular-targeted approaches. Emerging evidence reveals that beyond oncogenes and mutations, neuronal plasticity,...
Cellular plasticity enables cells to dynamically adapt their phenotype in response to environmental cues, a process central to development, tissue repair, and disease. Among the most studied plasticity programs is epithelial–mesenchymal transit...
To date, there is indisputable evidence of significant CTC heterogeneity in carcinomas, in particular breast cancer. The heterogeneity of CTCs is manifested in the key characteristics of tumor cells related to metastatic progression – stemness and ep...
Gene fusions can give rise to somatic alterations in cancers. Fusion genes have the potential to create chimeric RNAs, which can generate the phenotypic diversity of cancer cells, and could be associated with novel molecular functions related to canc...
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a subtype of breast carcinoma known for its unusually aggressive behavior and poor clinical outcome. Besides the lack of molecular targets for therapy and profound intratumoral heterogeneity, the relatively qui...
The hierarchical relationships between stem cells, lineage-committed progenitors, and differentiated cells remain unclear in several tissues, due to a high degree of cell plasticity, allowing cells to switch between different cell states. The mouse m...
Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is characterized by profound initial treatment sensitivity followed by frequent recurrence. Although genetic resistance contributes to disease progression, increasing evidence indicates that SCLC cells can transition amo...
Epithelial–mesenchymal plasticity (EMP) plays critical roles during embryonic development, wound repair, fibrosis, inflammation and cancer. During cancer progression, EMP results in heterogeneous and dynamic populations of cells with mixed epithelial...
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is one of the most aggressive subtypes of breast cancer, with only limited treatment options available. Recently, cancer stem cells (CSCs) have emerged as the potential drivers of tumor progression due to their ab...
Tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) are considered to be one of the most attractive targets in cancer therapy but attempts to target them have produced variable and often contradictory results. Their phenotype and function are shaped by developmental...
Prostate cancer (PCa), the most frequent and second most lethal cancer type in men in developed countries, is a highly heterogeneous disease. PCa heterogeneity, therapy resistance, stemness, and lethal progression have been attributed to lineage plas...
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive and clinically heterogeneous breast cancer subtype characterized by the absence of estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and HER2 overexpression, limited targeted treatment options, early rela...
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the Western world and the number is rising. Prostate cancer is notoriously heterogeneous, which makes it hard to generate and study in pre-clinical models. The family of Forkhead box (FOX) transcrip...
The biology of cancer stem cells (CSCs) of pediatric cancers, such as hepatoblastoma, is sparsely explored. This is mainly due to the very immature nature of these tumors, which complicates the distinction of CSCs from the other tumor cells. Previous...
Prostate cancer, the second most common malignancy in men, is characterized by high heterogeneity that poses several therapeutic challenges. Epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a dynamic, reversible cellular process which is essential in norma...
Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is an aggressive cancer recalcitrant to treatment, arising predominantly from epithelial pulmonary neuroendocrine (NE) cells. Intratumor heterogeneity plays critical roles in SCLC disease progression, metastasis, and tre...
Cancer stem cells (CSCs) constitute a resilient tumor subpopulation responsible for multidrug resistance, metastasis, and clinical relapse. A cardinal hallmark of these cells is profound metabolic plasticity. This dynamic defense mechanism facilitate...
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a class of non-coding RNA molecules with transcripts longer than 200 bp, which were initially thought to be noise from genomic transcription without biological function. However, since the discovery of H19 in 1980 a...
Breast cancer immunotherapy has advanced substantially, yet durable clinical benefit remains limited to selected patient populations, reflecting heterogeneity in tumor–immune interactions across molecular subtypes, disease stages, and treatment...
Recent evidence indicates that both epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and its reverse process, mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition (MET), are key mechanisms driving breast cancer (BC) metastasis. During EMT, epithelial BC cells acquire mese...
Phosphorylation has long been regarded as the principal mechanism governing oncogenic signal transduction. However, it does not fully account for the diversity, persistence, and context dependence of cancer signaling outputs. Protein methylation, his...
The tumor microenvironment (TME) is a highly adaptive and heterogeneous niche in which cancer stem cells (CSCs) promote immune evasion, metastatic dissemination, and therapy resistance. Among the mechanisms that support this phenotype, mitochondrial...
Triple-negative breast cancer is defined by the absence of druggable receptor targets and by a biologically dynamic phenotype that renders static, single-timepoint biomarker strategies fundamentally inadequate. Current predictive markers, including P...
Lineage plasticity, the switching of cells from one lineage to another, has been recognized as a cardinal property essential for embryonic development, tissue repair and homeostasis. However, such a highly regulated process goes awry when cancer cell...
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