0000000000174032
AUTHOR
Flavio Rizzolio
Repurposing old drugs to fight multidrug resistant cancers.
Overcoming multidrug resistance represents a major challenge for cancer treatment. In the search for new chemotherapeutics to treat malignant diseases, drug repurposing gained a tremendous interest during the past years. Repositioning candidates have often emerged through several stages of clinical drug development, and may even be marketed, thus attracting the attention and interest of pharmaceutical companies as well as regulatory agencies. Typically, drug repositioning has been serendipitous, using undesired side effects of small molecule drugs to exploit new disease indications. As bioinformatics gain increasing popularity as an integral component of drug discovery, more rational approa…
R-Roscovitine (Seliciclib) prevents DNA damage-induced cyclin A1 upregulation and hinders non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) DNA repair.
Abstract Background CDK-inhibitors can diminish transcriptional levels of cell cycle-related cyclins through the inhibition of E2F family members and CDK7 and 9. Cyclin A1, an E2F-independent cyclin, is strongly upregulated under genotoxic conditions and functionally was shown to increase NHEJ activity. Cyclin A1 outcompetes with cyclin A2 for CDK2 binding, possibly redirecting its activity towards DNA repair. To see if we could therapeutically block this switch, we analyzed the effects of the CDK-inhibitor R-Roscovitine on the expression levels of cyclin A1 under genotoxic stress and observed subsequent DNA damage and repair mechanisms. Results We found that R-Roscovitine alone was unable …