CCRK is a novel signalling hub exploitable in cancer immunotherapy
By M. T. Mok, Jingying Zhou, Wenshu Tang, Xuezhen Zeng, A. Oliver, S. Ward, A. Cheng. 2018
43 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT Cyclin‐dependent kinase 20 (CDK20), or more commonly referred to as cell cycle‐related kinase (CCRK), is the latest member of CDK family with strong linkage to human cancers. Accumulating studies have reported the consistent overexpression of CCRK in cancers arising from brain, colon, liver, lung and ovary. Such aberrant up‐regulation of CCRK is clinically significant as it correlates with tumor staging, shorter patient survival and poor prognosis. Intriguingly, the signalling molecules perturbed by CCRK are divergent and cancer‐specific, including the cell cycle regulators CDK2, cyclin D1, cyclin E and RB in glioblastoma, ovarian carcinoma and colorectal cancer, and KEAP1‐NRF2 cytoprotective pathway in lung cancer. In hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), CCRK mediates virus‐host interaction to promote hepatitis B virus‐associated tumorigenesis. Further mechanistic analyses reveal that CCRK orchestrates a self‐reinforcing circuitry comprising of AR, GSK3&bgr;, &bgr;‐catenin, AKT, EZH2, and NF‐&kgr;B signalling for transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. Notably, EZH2 and NF‐&kgr;B in this circuit have been recently shown to induce IL‐6 production to facilitate tumor immune evasion. Concordantly, in a hepatoma preclinical model, ablation of Ccrk disrupts the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment and enhances the therapeutic efficacy of immune checkpoint blockade via potentiation of anti‐tumor T cell responses. In this review, we summarized the multifaceted tumor‐intrinsic and ‐extrinsic functions of CCRK, which represents a novel signalling hub exploitable in cancer immunotherapy.
Subfields: Oncology, Pathology and Forensic Medicine
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
Citations in the corpus
- AlphaFold2 and its applications in the fields of biology and medicine (2023, background): “Through this approach, they discovered a small molecule hit compound for CDK20 (Cyclin-dependent Kinase 20) 91 with a Kd value of 8.9 ± 1.6 μ M within 30 days from target selection and after only synthesizing 7 compounds.”