Rismanbaf Amirhossein
Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology, Faculty of Advanced Science and Technology, Tehran Medical Sciences, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
Cancer Rep (Hoboken). 2024 Jan;7(1):e1945. doi: 10.1002/cnr2.1945. Epub 2023 Nov 22.
Conventional cancer treatments face the challenge of therapeutic resistance, which causes poor treatment outcomes. The use of combination therapies can improve treatment results in patients and is one of the solutions to overcome this challenge. Chemotherapy is one of the conventional treatments that, due to the non-targeted and lack of specificity in targeting cancer cells, can cause serious complications in the short and long-term for patients by damaging healthy cells. Also, the employment of a wide range of strategies for chemotherapy resistance by cancer cells, metastasis, and cancer recurrence create serious problems to achieve the desired results of chemotherapy. Accordingly, targeted therapies can be used as a combination treatment with chemotherapy to both cause less damage to healthy cells, which as a result, they reduce the side effects of chemotherapy, and by targeting the factors that cause therapeutic challenges, can improve the results of chemotherapy in patients.
Small molecules are one of the main targeted therapies that can be used for diverse targets in cancer treatment due to their penetration ability and characteristics. However, small molecules in cancer treatment are facing obstacles that a better understanding of cancer biology, as well as the mechanisms and factors involved in chemotherapy resistance, can lead to the improvement of this type of major targeted therapy.
In this review article, at first, the challenges that lead to not achieving the desired results in chemotherapy and how cancer cells can be resistant to chemotherapy are examined, and at the end, research areas are suggested that more focusing on them, can lead to the improvement of the results of using targeted small molecules as an adjunctive treatment for chemotherapy in the conditions of chemotherapy resistance and metastasis of cancer cells.
传统癌症治疗面临治疗耐药性的挑战，这导致治疗效果不佳。联合疗法的使用可以改善患者的治疗结果，是克服这一挑战的解决方案之一。化疗是传统治疗方法之一，由于其对癌细胞的非靶向性和缺乏特异性，会在短期和长期内通过损害健康细胞给患者带来严重并发症。此外，癌细胞通过多种策略产生化疗耐药性、转移和癌症复发，给实现化疗的预期效果带来严重问题。因此，靶向治疗可作为化疗的联合治疗方法，既能减少对健康细胞的损害，从而降低化疗的副作用，又能通过靶向导致治疗挑战的因素，改善患者的化疗效果。
小分子是主要的靶向治疗方法之一，由于其渗透能力和特性，可用于癌症治疗中的多种靶点。然而，癌症治疗中的小分子面临着一些障碍，更好地理解癌症生物学以及化疗耐药性涉及的机制和因素，可以改善这类主要的靶向治疗。
在这篇综述文章中，首先研究了导致化疗无法达到预期效果的挑战以及癌细胞如何对化疗产生耐药性，最后提出了一些研究领域，更多地关注这些领域，可以在癌细胞化疗耐药和转移的情况下提高使用靶向小分子作为化疗辅助治疗的效果。
