Evolutionary approaches to prolong progression-free survival in breast cancer.

ABSTRACT: Many cancers adapt to chemotherapeutic agents by upregulating membrane efflux pumps that export drugs from the cytoplasm, but this response comes at an energetic cost. In breast cancer patients, expression of these pumps is low in tumors before therapy but increases after treatment. While the evolution of therapeutic resistance is virtually inevitable, proliferation of resistant clones is not, suggesting strategies of adaptive therapy. Chemoresistant cells must consume excess resources to maintain resistance mechanisms, so adaptive therapy strategies explicitly aim to maintain a stable population of therapy-sensitive cells to suppress growth of resistant phenotypes through intratumoral competition. We used computational models parameterized by in vitro experiments to illustrate the efficac

SUBMITTER: Silva AS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3525750 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature