Journal Article

Unveiling the mechanisms and challenges of cancer drug resistance

Fatima, Kaneez, Aisha, Shariqa, Khan, Sameer Ullah, Malik, Fayaz

2024

Overview

Cancer treatment faces many hurdles and resistance is one among them. Anti-cancer treatment strategies are evolving due to innate and acquired resistance capacity, governed by genetic, epigenetic, proteomic, metabolic, or microenvironmental cues that ultimately enable selected cancer cells to survive and progress under unfavorable conditions. Although the mechanism of drug resistance is being widely studied to generate new target-based drugs with better potency than existing ones. However, due to the broader flexibility in acquired drug resistance, advanced therapeutic options with better efficacy need to be explored. Combination therapy is an alternative with a better success rate though the risk of amplified side effects is commonplace. Moreover, recent groundbreaking precision immune therapy is one of the ways to overcome drug resistance and has revolutionized anticancer therapy to a greater extent with the only limitation of being individual-specific and needs further attention. This review will focus on the challenges and strategies opted by cancer cells to withstand the current therapies at the molecular level and also highlights the emerging therapeutic options -like immunological, and stem cell-based options that may prove to have better potential to challenge the existing problem of therapy resistance. 3-XVUB_ebN3hwzsWHiRmg5 Video Abstract

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Antineoplastic Agents - pharmacology / Antineoplastic Agents - therapeutic use / Apoptosis / Autophagy / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Cancer / Cancer stem cells / Cancer therapies / Care and treatment / Causes of / Cell Biology / Chemotherapy / Cloning / Complications and side effects / Cytokines and Growth Factors / Cytotoxicity / Development and progression / DNA repair / Drug resistance / Drug Resistance, Neoplasm - genetics / Drug therapy / Epigenetic inheritance / Epigenetics / Extracellular vesicles / Genetic aspects / Genetic diversity / Growth factors / Health aspects / Humans / Hypotheses / Immune cells / Immunosuppressive agents / Immunotherapy / Life Sciences / Liver cancer / Lung cancer / Marsh, Terence / Methods / Multi-drug resistance / Mutation / Neoplasms - drug therapy / Neoplasms - genetics / Physiological aspects / Protein-Ligand Interactions / Proteomics / Receptors / Review / Stem cells / Vincristine