Cancer stem cell hypothesis triggered a big enthusiasm for developing drugs specially targeting Cancer stem cell. There are even several bioTech companies which specialized on drugs on
Cancer stem cell.
Unfortunately, Weinberg's group find that non-stem cancer cell can spontaneously transition to Cancer stem cell (PNAS 2011). His former Phd Gupta further develop this idea to a Markov model which is published in Cell. During our theory Lunch, our group discuss this paper. PowerPoint file is attached.