Single-cell analysis as a guiding tool to understand drug resistance in cancer: Current opportunities and scope

Single-cell analysis and cancer drug resistance

Abstract

Cancer is emerging as a global threat with high morbidity and mortality. Drug resistance and tumor heterogeneity are arising as the major obstacles in cancer therapy. These are also for the accumulation of undesirable chemotherapeutic treatment outcomes. Diverse interaction of surviving cells including those with the tumor micro-environment lead to tumor recurrence and metastasis. Cancer cells hijack different mechanisms to resist the targeted drug. Among these, heterogeneity hinders the identification of individual cells in the tumor population. Therefore, new technologies are urgently required to further justify the mechanisms of cancer so that better detection and treatment strategies can be addressed. In this line of discussion, single-cell analysis is growing as a gold standard tool to study cancer cells via using combination approaches at the single-cell level. The single-cell technique might be a hopeful intervention to potentially understand the science of individual cancer cells to invent more effective and safe treatment strategies via reversing drug resistance. In this article, we aim to review the spectrum of factors associated with drug resistance in cancer followed by the application of single-cell analysis in drug resistant cancer.