Targeting oncogenic Myc as a strategy for cancer treatment

By Hui Chen, Hudan Liu, Guoliang Qing. Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, 2018

710 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The MYC family oncogene is deregulated in >50% of human cancers, and this deregulation is frequently associated with poor prognosis and unfavorable patient survival. Myc has a central role in almost every aspect of the oncogenic process, orchestrating proliferation, apoptosis, differentiation, and metabolism. Although Myc inhibition would be a powerful approach for the treatment of many types of cancers, direct targeting of Myc has been a challenge for decades owing to its “undruggable” protein structure. Hence, alternatives to Myc blockade have been widely explored to achieve desirable anti-tumor effects, including Myc/Max complex disruption, MYC transcription and/or translation inhibition, and Myc destabilization as well as the synthetic lethality associated with Myc overexpression. In this review, we summarize the latest advances in targeting oncogenic Myc, particularly for cancer therapeutic purposes.Cancer: Therapeutic strategies target myc from all directionsThe cancer gene myc is the subject of a variety of research strategies aimed at developing anti-cancer therapies. Myc, which regulates at least 15% of all genes including those involved in cell development and survival, is mutated and overexpressed in many cancer types. While inhibiting myc is an obvious anti-cancer strategy, directly targeting myc has proved difficult. Dr Guoliang Qing and colleagues from Wuhan University have reviewed advances in myc-targeting strategies as potential cancer therapies. Current strategies include indirectly targeting myc by inhibiting its regulation and stability, and interaction with its partner Max, which is necessary for its regulation of gene expression. Other strategies involve inducing a mutation in a gene that interacts with myc to kill cancer cells. These and future innovative approaches provide promise for effective therapeutics against myc-dependent cancers.

Subfields: Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/221865293599af18c30b1d3a73befc10d40c6de9

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In Molecular Biology

1. A. Hanker
2. D. Sudhan
3. Carlos L. Arteaga

Citations in the corpus

• Overcoming Endocrine Resistance in Breast Cancer (2020, positive): “Decreasing Myc expression with BET inhibitors may be a potential strategy to overcome resistance in tumors with MYC or CTCF alterations (Chen et al., 2018; Delmore et al., 2011).”