title: Human skin cancer stem cells: a tale of mice and men.
abstract: Carcinomas, cancers of epithelial tissues, are the commonest malignancies and cause the greatest cancer mortality worldwide. Among these, the incidence of keratinocyte-derived non-melanoma skin cancers (NMSC), by far the greatest, is increasing rapidly. Yet despite access to tumor tissue, acceptance of human NMSC as a model carcinoma has been hindered by the lack of a reliable xenograft model. Instead, we have relied on the murine two-step carcinogenesis protocol as a reproducible squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) model, but this differs from their human counterpart in cause, site, genetic basis and biological behaviour. By xeno-engraftment of primary human SCC, we were recently successful in demonstrating the presence of primary human SCC cancer stem cells or tumor-initiating cells. These findings once more align the study human SCC as the archetypal carcinoma model. In this review, we describe the evidence for the existence of tumor-initiating cells, with emphasis on skin cancer, limiting our discussions to primary human cancer studies where possible.
authors: Department of Dermatology and Wound Healing, School of Medicine Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
authors: Chantal S
authors: CS
authors: Colmont
authors: Keith G
authors: KG
authors: Harding
authors: Vincent
authors: V
authors: Piguet
authors: Girish K
authors: GK
authors: Patel
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001402:B-Lymphocytes / Q000473:pathology; D002294:Carcinoma, Squamous Cell / Q000473:pathology*; D002454:Cell Differentiation; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D006801:Humans; D051379:Mice; D014411:Neoplastic Stem Cells / Q000473:pathology*; D012878:Skin Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D014183:Transplantation, Heterologous