Crosstalk between endoplasmic reticulum stress and multidrug-resistant cancers: hope or frustration

Bowen Qing; Song Wang; Yingan Du; Can Liu; Wei Li

doi:10.3389/fphar.2023.1273987

Crosstalk between endoplasmic reticulum stress and multidrug-resistant cancers: hope or frustration

Front Pharmacol. 2023 Sep 18:14:1273987. doi: 10.3389/fphar.2023.1273987. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Bowen Qing¹, Song Wang², Yingan Du¹, Can Liu¹, Wei Li¹

Affiliations

¹ First Affiliated Hospital of Hunan Normal University, Department of Hematology, Hunan Provincial People's Hospital, Changsha, China.
² Department of Neurology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, China.

Abstract

Endoplasmic reticulum stress (ERS) is a kind of cell response for coping with hypoxia and other stresses. Pieces of evidence show that continuous stress can promote the occurrence, development, and drug resistance of tumors through the unfolded protein response. Therefore, the abnormal ac-tivation of ERS and its downstream signaling pathways not only can regulate tumor growth and metastasis but also profoundly affect the efficacy of antitumor therapy. Therefore, revealing the molecular mechanism of ERS may be expected to solve the problem of tumor multidrug resistance (MDR) and become a novel strategy for the treatment of refractory and recurrent tumors. This re-view summarized the mechanism of ERS and tumor MDR, reviewed the relationship between ERS and tumor MDR, introduced the research status of tumor tissue and ERS, and previewed the prospect of targeting ERS to improve the therapeutic effect of tumor MDR. This article aims to provide researchers and clinicians with new ideas and inspiration for basic antitumor treatment.

Keywords: apoptosis; endoplasmic reticulum stress; molecular mechanism; multidrug resistance; unfolded protein response.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

The authors declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (grant number 2020JJ4403), The project of scientific research support for the rehabilitation of the disabled in Hunan province (grant number 2019XK012).