Future Prospects in Breast Cancer Research – Cancer Stem Cells

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths among women. Although significant advances in the prevention, diagnosis and management are made, still every year half a million women die of breast cancer. Personalised treatment has the potential to increase treatment efficacy, and hence decrease mortality rates. Moreover, understanding cancer biology and translating this knowledge to the clinic, will improve the breast cancer therapy regime tremendously. Recently, it has been proposed that cancer stem cells (CSC) play an important role in tumour biology. CSC have the ability for self-renewal and are pivotal in setting the heterogeneous character of a tumour. Additionally, CSC possess several characteristics that make them resistant and more aggressive to the conventional chemo- and radiotherapy. Nowadays, breast cancer therapy is focused on killing the differentiated tumour cells, leaving the CSC unharmed, potentially causing recurrence of the disease and metastasis. Specific targeting of the CSC will improve the disease-free survival of breast cancer patients. In this article, two methods are described, aiming at specifically attacking the differentiated tumour cells (‘Apoptosis chip’) and the cancer stem cell. For this, microfluidics is used.