The root cause of tumor recurrence or metastasis is a small part of the tumor with unlimited proliferation of tumor stem cells,which can exist for a long time and continue to self-renewal causing rapid tumor proliferation and invasion, metastasis capacity, drug sensitivity, eventually resulting in the problem of weakened clinical treatment. Therefore,it is of great importance to in-depth understanding of tumor stem cells and then to seek strategies to suppress tumor stem cells in clinical targeted tumor therapy. In this paper,the discovery process of tumor stem cells,biological characteristics,identification and culture methods were described to summary a va-riety of methods to inhibit tumor stem cells according to their characteristics so as to treat tumor. Moreover,it focu-ses on the research progress on antibiotic treatment of cancer stem cells.