Commonly expressed genes among cancer stem cells induced from hiPSCs and Obtained from cancer tissues or cell lines

Introduction: Cancer is one of the serious health problems in worldwide. For the development of radical cancer treatment, cancer stem cells (CSCs) are getting an issue of focus. CSCs are thought to be resistant to chemotherapy and cause metastasis. Although it is very important to understand their characters in detail, the knowledge so far is not sufficient due to their low ratio in tumor tissues. Subjects and Methods: We have induced CSCs from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) culturing in the conditioned media from cancer-derived cells without introducing genes or mutations. These induced CSCs actually have CSCs-like properties of self-renewal, differentiation potential, and tumorigenicity. In this study, their gene expression data are compared with more than 1000 sets of data from normal stem cells, our CSCs, CSCs obtained from cancer tissues or cell lines and cancer cells, which obtained from Gene Expression Omnibus. Results: Although there were no known cancer stem cell markers which can distinguish CSCs from other cell types, clustering with spherical self-organizing map revealed the expression of NTNG1, ABLIM2, DNM3, EDN1, XLOC_001990, and ISY1-RAB43 are significantly high in CSCs. Conclusion: Their expression should help to find CSCs as the markers in the future. Simultaneously, the function of these genes should become important to be clarified.