“…Human cancer types frequently harboring a deregulation in the Hh pathway include leukemia, multiple myeloma, and brain, skin, head and neck, lung, liver, gastrointestinal, colorectal, pancreatic, prostate, mammary, ovarian, and renal carcinomas (Berman et al, 2003;Thayer et al, 2003;Karhadkar et al, 2004;Oniscu et al, 2004;Sanchez et al, 2004;Sheng et al, 2004;Ohta et al, 2005;Datta and Datta, 2006;Douard et al, 2006;Mimeault et al, 2006Mimeault et al, , 2007aBian et al, 2007;Chen et al, 2007b;Stecca et al, 2007;Taniguchi et al, 2007;Bhattacharya et al, 2008;Hegde et al, 2008;Tada et al, 2008;Eichenmü ller et al, 2009). More importantly, accumulating lines of evidence have also revealed that the persistent activation of the Hh cascade may represent a critical step in the malignant transformation of cancer stem/progenitor cells (also designated as cancer-and metastasis-initiating cells), treatment resistance, and disease relapse Bar et al, 2007;Clement et al, 2007;Ehtesham et al, 2007;Mimeault et al, 2007bPeacock et al, 2007;Batra, 2008a, 2010b,c;Xu et al, 2008;Kobune et al, 2009;Ward et al, 2009).…”