Cancer stem cells and macrophages: molecular connections and future perspectives against cancer
Beatrice Aramini, Valentina Masciale, Giulia Grisendi, Federico Banchelli, Roberto D’Amico, Antonino Maiorana, Uliano Morandi, Massimo Dominici, Khawaja Husnain Haider
Abstract
// Beatrice Aramini 1 , Valentina Masciale 1 , Giulia Grisendi 2 , Federico Banchelli 3 , Roberto D’Amico 3 , Antonino Maiorana 4 , Uliano Morandi 1 , Massimo Dominici 2 and Khawaja Husnain Haider 5 1 Division of Thoracic Surgery, Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy 2 Division of Oncology, Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy 3 Center of Statistic, Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy 4 Institute of Pathology, Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy 5 Sulaiman AlRajhi Medical School, AlQaseem, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Correspondence to: Beatrice Aramini, email: [email protected] Keywords: cancer stem cells; macrophages; future perspectives; cancer; target treatments Received: May 11, 2020     Accepted: January 07, 2021     Published: February 02, 2021 Copyright: © 2021 Aramini et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ABSTRACT Cancer stem cells (CSCs) have been considered the key drivers of cancer initiation and progression due to their unlimited self-renewal capacity and their ability to induce tumor formation. Macrophages, particularly tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs), establish a tumor microenvironment to protect and induce CSCs development and dissemination. Many studies in the past decade have been performed to understand the molecular mediators of CSCs and TAMs, and several studies have elucidated the complex crosstalk that occurs between these two cell types. The aim of this review is to define the complex crosstalk between these two cell types and to highlight potential future anti-cancer strategies.