The Guangdong team found a potential drug target for colorectal cancer, the Sixth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University Courtesy of the picture
Guangzhou, November 1 (Cai Minjie, Jian Wenyang) How to overcome chemotherapy resistance has always been a hot and difficult problem in the field of tumor research. The Sixth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University released a news release on November 1 that the research group of Wu Xiaojian, vice president of the hospital, and the research group of Tan Jing, a researcher at the Cancer Prevention and Control Center of Sun Yat-sen University, recently published research results in the journal Advanced Science. By integrating and analyzing the sample data of large-scale colorectal cancer patients, the research team found that plk1 may be a potential drug target for colorectal cancer, and found that the combined use of plk1 inhibitors can improve the anti-tumor effect of chemotherapy drugs, which provides new treatment ideas for rectal cancer patients who are resistant to chemotherapy drugs or have tumor recurrence.
In China, nearly 400,000 new colorectal cancer patients occur each year. The incidence of colorectal cancer has risen to the 3rd place of all malignancies, after lung and stomach cancer.
Chemotherapy resistance to colorectal cancer is an unavoidable problem in clinical treatment, and a considerable number of patients undergo radical treatment for colorectal cancer, but tumor recurrence and metastasis occur due to chemotherapy resistance, and finally tumors spread and grow indefinitely due to the lack of drugs available.
Finding therapeutic targets based on multi-omics sequencing data and validating them in models of patient tumor sources is one of the effective means of developing targeted drugs.
In order to explore potential therapeutic targets to overcome chemotherapy resistance, the research team first integrated the gene chip data of 54 colorectal cancer tumor tissues and paired paracancerous mucosal tissues, and found that the plk1 signaling pathway was overactivated, suggesting that plk1 may be an effective therapeutic target for colorectal cancer. In addition, the research team found high expression of plk1 in tumor tissue in patients who relapsed after chemotherapy, suggesting that it may be associated with chemotherapy resistance.
At the same time, the study found that plk1 inhibitors can enhance the inhibitory effect of the chemotherapy drug oxaliplatin on tumor cells, and this phenotype has been verified in colorectal cancer cell lines, organoid models of patient tumor origin, and pdx (human tumor xenotransplantation) models.
The research team explored the therapeutic potential of plk1 inhibitors in colorectal cancer, elucidated the pharmacological mechanism of the combination of plk1 inhibitors and the chemotherapy drug oxaliplatin, and found that treatments that can effectively improve oxaliplatin sensitivity can be found.
According to reports, the above research has also been supported by Professor Yu Qiang of the Singapore Genome Research Institute. (End)
Source: China News Network