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. 2015 Oct 21;107(1):5–11. doi: 10.1111/cas.12817

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© 2015 The Authors. Cancer Science published by Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd on behalf of Japanese Cancer Association.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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Biological characteristics of cancer stem cells. Cancer stem cells possess both self‐renewal ability and multilineage differentiation potential, leading to the composition of intratumoral heterogeneity (a). Cancer stem cells possess the property of “robustness,” which is established by a combination of various phenotypes (b). Cancer stem cells are more resistant to various therapeutic interventions, leading to the generation of minimal residual disease (MRD) that is mainly composed by CSCs, and MRD is a major cause of recurrence and metastasis (c). ABC, ATP‐binding cassette.