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Updated: Dec 21, 2025

Isolation and Functional Assessment of Human Breast Cancer Stem Cells from Cell and Tissue Samples
Published on: October 2, 2020
Mechanistic Pathways of Malignancy in Breast Cancer Stem Cells
Saghar Yousefnia1, Farzad Seyed Forootan2,3, Shiva Seyed Forootan4
1Department of Cell and Molecular Biology and Microbiology, Faculty of Biological Science and Technology, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran.
Abstract:
Breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs) are the minor population of breast cancer (BC) cells that exhibit several phenotypes such as migration, invasion, self-renewal, and chemotherapy as well as radiotherapy resistance. Recently, BCSCs have been more considerable due to their capacity for recurrence of tumors after treatment. Recognition of signaling pathways and molecular mechanisms involved in stemness phenotypes of BCSCs could be effective for discovering novel treatment strategies to target BCSCs. This review introduces BCSC markers, their roles in stemness phenotypes, and the dysregulated signaling pathways involved in BCSCs such as mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase, PI3K/Akt/nuclear factor kappa B (NFκB), TGF-β, hedgehog (Hh), Notch, Wnt/β-catenin, and Hippo pathway. In addition, this review presents recently discovered molecular mechanisms implicated in chemotherapy and radiotherapy resistance, migration, metastasis, and angiogenesis of BCSCs. Finally, we reviewed the role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in BCSCs as well as several other therapeutic strategies such as herbal medicine, biological agents, anti-inflammatory drugs, monoclonal antibodies, nanoparticles, and microRNAs, which have been more considerable in the last decades.
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