Department of Internal Medicine III with Haematology, Medical Oncology, Haemostaseology, Infectiology and Rheumatology, Oncologic Center, Salzburg Cancer Research Institute - Laboratory for Immunological and Molecular Cancer Research (SCRI-LIMCR), Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg, Austria, Cancer Cluster Salzburg, 5020Salzburg, Austria.
Curr Cancer Drug Targets. 2021;21(4):353-359. doi: 10.2174/1568009620666210108102723.
Cancer drug resistance is a major problem for cancer therapy. While many drugs can be effective in first-line treatments, cancer cells can become resistant due to genetic (mutations and chromosomal aberrations) but also epigenetic changes. Hence, many research studies addressed epigenetic drugs in circumventing resistance to conventional therapeutics in different tumor entities and in increasing the efficiency of immune checkpoint therapies. Furthermore, repositioning of already approved drugs in combination with epigenetic modifiers could potentiate their efficacy and thus could be an attractive strategy for cancer treatment. Summarizing, we recapitulate current data on epigenetic drugs and their targets in modulating sensitivity towards conventional and immune therapies, providing evidence that altering expression profiles by epigenetic modifiers holds great potential to improve the clinical outcome of cancer patients.
癌症耐药性是癌症治疗的主要问题。虽然许多药物在一线治疗中可能有效，但由于遗传（突变和染色体异常）和表观遗传变化，癌细胞可能会产生耐药性。因此，许多研究都集中在研究表观遗传药物，以规避不同肿瘤实体中对传统治疗的耐药性，并提高免疫检查点治疗的效率。此外，将已经批准的药物与表观遗传修饰剂联合重新定位可能会增强其疗效，因此这可能是癌症治疗的一种有吸引力的策略。综上所述，我们总结了目前关于表观遗传药物及其靶标在调节对传统和免疫治疗的敏感性方面的最新数据，这表明通过表观遗传修饰剂改变表达谱具有很大的潜力，可以改善癌症患者的临床疗效。
