Abstract
Drug resistance remains a significant problem in the treatment of patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Recent reports showed that a subpopulation of highly tumorigenic cells, called cancer stem cells (CSCs), is uniquely resistant to chemotherapy, suggesting that these cells play an important role in the relapse of HNSCC. The development of methods for the isolation and culture of cancer stem cells is a key step to enable studies exploring the mechanisms underlying the role of these cells in chemoresistance. Here, we describe a method to isolate cancer stem cells from primary head and neck tumors and for the generation of orospheres.