Although cancer stem cells (CSCs) play a crucial role in seeding the initiation of tumor progression, they do not always possess the same potent ability as tumor metastasis. Thus, precisely how migrating CSCs occur, still remains unclear. In the present study, we first comparatively analyzed a series of prostate CSCs, which exhibited a dynamically increasing and disseminating ability in nude mice. We observed that the transcriptional activity of HIF-1α and β-catenin became gradually elevated in these stem cells and their epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) characteristic altered from an epithelial type to a mesenchymal type. Next, we further used cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs), which were cultured from surgically resected tissues of prostate cancer (PCa) to stimulate prostate CSCs. Similar results were reconfirmed and showed that the protein levels of both HIF-1α and β-catenin were markedly improved. In addition, the EMT phenotype displayed a homogenous mesenchymal type, accompanied with increased aggressive potency in vitro. Most importantly, the aforementioned promoting effect of CAFs on prostate CSCs was completely repressed after “silencing” the activity of β-catenin by transfection of stem cells with ShRNA. Taken together, our observations suggest that prostate migrating CSCs, with a mesenchymal phenotype, could be triggered by CAFs in a HIF-1α/β-catenin-dependent signaling pathway.

Keywords: cancer-associated fibroblast, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, migrating cancer stem cell, prostate cancer