Janus-Faced role of microRNA let-7d in osteosarcoma 3AB-OS cancer stem cells

Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common malignancy of bone in children and adolescent. It is a highly invasive and metastatic bone-malignancy because of which, despite therapeutic advances, 30%-50% of patients still die of pulmonary metastasis. As a consequence, there is an urgent need to identify new therapeutic strategies to improve the clinical outcome of the patients. Advances in OS treatment are inconceivable without better understanding of molecular mechanism of osteosarmagenesis and, especially, metastatic processes. Growing evidence suggests that cancer stem cells (CSCs), which have self-renewing and malignant potential, are at the root of tumor growth and relapse. Thus, a challenge fo…

Human osteosarcoma 3AB-OS cancer stem cells is a model to study microRNA-29b-1 involvement in self-renewal and fate decisions of stem cells

MiR-29b-1 expression impaired Cancer Stem-Like properties of human osteosarcoma 3AB-OS cells in vitro.

Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common type of bone cancer, with a peak incidence in the early childhood. Emerging evidence suggests that treatments targeting cancer stem cells (CSCs) within a tumor can halt cancer and improve patient survival. Although microRNAs are frequently dysregulated in human cancers, if they influence OS malignancy and whether or not targeting CSC-associated microRNAs inhibit OS progression remain unclear. Recently (1), we described a predictive network for two downregulated miRNA family (let-7/98 and miR-29a,b,c) and their upregulated anticorrelated mRNAs. Here, we investigated in vitro the role of miR-29b-1 in regulating cell proliferation, clonogenic growth and che…

MicroRNA-29b-1 is involved in self-renewal and fate decisions of human osteosarcoma 3AB-OS cancer stem cells

Emerging evidence suggests that treatments targeting cancer stem cells (CSCs) within a tumor can halt cancer and improve patient survival. Moreover, identification of CSC-related MicroRNAs (miRNAs) would provide information for a better understanding of CSCs. miR-29 family is a class of miRNAs aberrantly expressed in multiple cancers. They are frequently down-regulated in osteosarcoma (OS), the most common form of childhood cancer with a potent metastasizing potential. 3AB-OS CSC, a human pluripotent CSC line by us produced from the human osteosarcoma MG63 cells (1) is a useful model to study CSC origin and roles (2). Previously, we have shown that in 3AB-OS CSCs miR-29b is potently down-re…