POU5F1 and breast cancer: Since in several types of tumors, including breast cancer Wnt/β-catenin and Akt- signaling pathways are implicated in the regulation of self-renewal of CSCs, and recently Akt has been identified as an upstream regulator of SOX2 protein in breast carcinoma [28], we also investigated whether miR-29b-1 affected the expression of OCT4, SOX2 and NANOG, key stemness genes.