The Effect of Radiotherapy on Breast Cancer Stem Cells: Resistance, Reprogramming and Treatments

In the past decade, the identification of cancer stem cells (CSCs) has raised new hope for the development of anticancer therapies. Nevertheless, CSC characterization highlights the relative resistance of CSCs to conventional therapies such as ionizing radiation. Moreover, it has been recently shown that some anti-cancer treatments could induce non-CSCs reprogramming into CSCs through anti-cancer treatment effect, enriching tumors with resistant cells. In this review, we will discuss CSC properties; we will especially describe the radio-resistance of CSC, reprogramming and explore the therapeutic approaches to by-pass these resistances.