A FOCUS ON FAILURE OF DRUG THERAPY FOR TARGETING CANCER STEM CELL: A REVIEW

Kharade Sudha*, Veer Akash, Patil Abhishekh and Suryvanshi Sudarshan

ABSTRACT

Medical oncology and innovation in pharmaceutical industry, targeted therapy provides physicians and patients with more options to improve clinical outcomes as evidenced by improvement in overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), and response rate (RR), among other end points. Effective anti-cancer treatments have been able to eliminate macroscopic tumors both at primary sites and at common distal sites. There has been a consensus that, to improve the results of targeted therapy, challenging drug resistance problems needs to be solved through better understanding the mechanisms. Nevertheless, even if they showed an impressive response to treatment initially, the majority of cancer patients relapsed because small cohorts of tumor cells can survive in cryptic anatomic loci and exhibit up to 90% resistance to one or more therapeutic agents for months or year(s). As such, drug resistance has been a major hurdle for classic anti-cancer medicines, and it still is a great challenge facing the emerged array of targeted therapies. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview regarding cancer stem cell targeted therapy resistance.This review aims to focus on Concept of growth of cancer stem cell and describe the Failure to avoid drug resistance when targeting cancer cell as well as modifications inducing cancer cell resistance to chemotherapy.

Keywords: oncology, targeted therapy, cancer stem cell, cancer cell resistance.