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Cancer Stem Cells and EMT: Guilty of HNSCC Recurrences but Condemned by the Combination of Carbon Ion Irradiation and EGFR inhibition
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Edité par CCSD -
International audience. Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) frequently escape to treatments combining radiotherapy, chemotherapy and/or cetuximab, an EGFR inhibitor. Local recurrence (primary tumor site) or metastases (distant organs) could partially be favored by photon radiation (in contrast with carbon ions), which might enhance the invasion and migration of surviving cancer cells and promote epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) (for review Moncharmont et al., Crit Rev in Oncol, 2014). Furthermore, molecular connections between the EMT program and stem-cell state have recently emerged, pointing out a double danger for cancer patients, since cancer stem cells (CSCs) have the ability to renew indefinitely and are resistant to apoptosis (for review Moncharmont et al., Cancer Letters, 2012). We thus focused on invasionmigration and the EMT process in two radioresistant HSNCC cell lines (SQ20B and FaDu) and their CSCsubpopulation (Bertrand et al, Stem Cell Rev, 2014) after their irradiation at a clinical dose of 2 Gy photons or carbon ions, with or without the combination of a 5nM cetuximab pre-treatment.