High mitochondrial ATP is a metabolic feature that gives
cancer cells excessive proliferation,
dryness, non-anchorage dependence,
antioxidant capacity and multidrug resistance. Under this method,
intracellular ATP levels can be used as
metabolic biomarkers for identifying, separating and purifying invasive and overproliferation
cancer stem cells ("CSC") phenotypes. In addition, ATP can be combined with other CSC markers (such as CD44 or ALDH activity) to beneficially classify CSC groups into subgroups. For example, the non-anchorage-dependent growth level shown by high ATP / high CD44CSC subgroups is twice that of low ATP / high CD44CSC subgroups. It is also disclosed that mitochondrial ATP synthesis involves the
dryness, transfer and detection of circulating
tumor cells ("CTC"), and five ATP-related
transfer gene features (ABCA2, ATP5F1C, COX20, NDUFA2 and UQCRB). The
gene features of this method can be used to identify CSCs with significantly increased
cell migration and invasion ability
in vitro and spontaneous
metastasis in vivo. This approach also provides a cellular platform for systemically targeting the stemness, multidrug resistance, and
metastasis of
cancer cells.