Expression data from Disulfiram or 5-FU treated tumor-initiating hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells.

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) or tumor-initiating cells (TICs) organize a cellular hierarchy in a similar fashion to normal stem cell systems and exhibit high tumorigenic activity in xenograft transplantation assay. Disulfiram (DSF) could preferentially eradicate TICs, but the molecular machinery of its effect against TICs still remains largely unknown. We found that flow cytometric analyses showed that DSF but not 5-FU drastically reduces the number of tumor-initiating HCC cells. We conducted microarray analyses to examine gene expression profiling in DSF-treated tumor-initiating HCC cells. Purified EpCAM-positive HCC cells treated with Disulfiram or 5-FU were subjected to RNA extraction and hybridization on Agilent microarrays. Data were obtained for tripricate samples from three independent experiments.