With the ability of self-renew, limitless proliferation and multiple differentiation potential, CSCs are thought to be the source of tumor initiation , growth, relapse, metastasis. The study of CSCs could greatly facilitate the early diagnosis, effective treatment and prognosis of malignant tumors.

Recently, professor Yimin Zhu’s lab, at Suzhou Institute of Nano-tech and Nano-bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which devoted to screening special functional peptide, has developed a biomarker independent way to detect and isolate CSCs. After analyzing the microRNA expressing pattern of the peptide-binding lung CSCs, CSCs could be divided into different sub-population, which indicated that the peptide could be used to study the heterogeneity of CSCs And the special miRNA can work as the biomarker of different subset of CSCs. The related work was published in Cancer Lett, 351 (2014) 100-107。

Targeting the CSCs, not only the tumor tissue, could be a more effective way of treating cancer and in line with the trend of personalized medicine. Therefore，we reviewed the sources of CSC heterogeneity, the diversity of CSC phenotype and the implications of CSC heterogeneity in CSC targeted therapy.The related review was published on the issue of Cancer Lett, 2015, 357 (1), 63-68.

The support fundings came from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81171451, 81372361 and 30870683) and the Chinese academy of science.