Multifactorial setup involved in stemness regulation of drug resistant cancers

Cancer is an heterogenous group of diseases depending upon expression of distinct molecular signatures and even characterized by absence of molecular targets useful for therapeutic approaches. Several forms of solid cancers including breast, prostate, ovarian, lung, colon cancer show most aggressiveness features with great metastatic potential, failure in clinical outcome and poor prognosis. Moreover, several pieces of evidence suggest that some forms of cancer are enriched in cancer stem cells (CSCs), which markedly contribute to therapy resistance and failure, a phenomenon defined as multi-drug resistance (MDR), leading to recurrence and an increase in mortality. The dysregulation of stemness pathways is even more enhanced in these forms of cancer, giving a particularly problematic clinical phenotype. Nowadays, there is a constant need to find new and selective molecular targets which could lead to the development of therapeutic target therapy approaches. For example, transcriptome dysregulation, immune microenvironment or cancer cell metabolism can represent valid fields of study. Although it is highly auspicious to identify cancer-cell-specific drugs, nowadays research is still far from achieving this goal. The goal of this Special Issue, entitled “Multifactorial setup involved in stemness regulation of drug resistance cancers” is to collect recent experimental evidence on genetic, epigenetic, metabolic reprogramming, transcriptional and proteomic regulations, biochemical pathways, regulation of stemness and its crosstalk with microenvironment to define novel molecular strategies to challenge the drug resistant features in cancer.