Narrative review of emerging roles for AKT-mTOR signaling in cancer radioimmunotherapy

Changxian Shen; Yuqi He; Qiang Chen; Haihua Feng; Terence M Williams; Yuanzhi Lu; Zhengfu He

doi:10.21037/atm-21-4544

Narrative review of emerging roles for AKT-mTOR signaling in cancer radioimmunotherapy

Ann Transl Med. 2021 Oct;9(20):1596. doi: 10.21037/atm-21-4544.

Authors

Changxian Shen¹, Yuqi He², Qiang Chen³, Haihua Feng¹, Terence M Williams¹, Yuanzhi Lu⁴, Zhengfu He⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Radiation Oncology, Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope National Medical Center, Duarte, CA, USA.
² Monash School of Medicine, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia.
³ Department of Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.
⁴ Department of Clinical Pathology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.
⁵ Department of Thoracic Surgery, Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, College of Medicine Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.

Abstract

Objective: To summarize the roles of AKT-mTOR signaling in the regulation of the DNA damage response and PD-L1 expression in cancer cells, and propose a novel strategy of targeting AKT-mTOR signaling in combination with radioimmunotherapy in the era of cancer immunotherapy.

Background: Immunotherapy has greatly improved the clinical outcomes of many cancer patients and has changed the landscape of cancer patient management. However, only a small subgroup of cancer patients (~20-30%) benefit from immune checkpoint blockade-based immunotherapy. The current challenge is to find biomarkers to predict the response of patients to immunotherapy and strategies to sensitize patients to immunotherapy.

Methods: Search and review the literature which were published in PUBMED from 2000-2021 with the key words mTOR, AKT, drug resistance, DNA damage response, immunotherapy, PD-L1, DNA repair, radioimmunotherapy.

Conclusions: More than 50% of cancer patients receive radiotherapy during their course of treatment. Radiotherapy has been shown to reduce the growth of locally irradiated tumors as well as metastatic non-irradiated tumors (abscopal effects) by affecting systemic immunity. Consistently, immunotherapy has been demonstrated to enhance radiotherapy with more than one hundred clinical trials of radiation in combination with immunotherapy (radioimmunotherapy) across cancer types. Nevertheless, current available data have shown limited efficacy of trials testing radioimmunotherapy. AKT-mTOR signaling is a major tumor growth-promoting pathway and is upregulated in most cancers. AKT-mTOR signaling is activated by growth factors as well as genotoxic stresses including radiotherapy. Importantly, recent advances have shown that AKT-mTOR is one of the main signaling pathways that regulate DNA damage repair as well as PD-L1 levels in cancers. These recent advances clearly suggest a novel cancer therapy strategy by targeting AKT-mTOR signaling in combination with radioimmunotherapy.

Keywords: AKT; DNA damage response; DNA repair; Mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR); drug resistance; immunotherapy; programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1); radioimmunotherapy.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

R01 CA246553/CA/NCI NIH HHS/United States