Cancer is a disease that claims millions of lives each year across the world. Despite advancement in technologies and therapeutics for treating the disease, these modes are often found to turn ineffective during the course of treatment. The resistance against drugs in cancer patients stems from multiple factors, which constitute genetic heterogeneity like gene mutations, tumor microenvironment, exosomes, miRNAs, high rate of drug efflux from cells, and so on. This review attempts to collate all such known and reported factors that influence cancer drug resistance and may help researchers with information that might be useful in developing better therapeutics in near future to enable better management of several cancers across the world.
Keywords: alternate signaling pathway; cancer drug resistance; exosomes; miRNAs; tumor microenvironment.
© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.