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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Inhibition of ATP-Binding Cassette Transporters by Chinese Herbs and Phytochemicals

subject

description

The gene family of ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters is widely distributed over the evolutionary tree of life from bacteria to man. In cancer, several ABC transporters are involved in the transport of anticancer drugs. This leads to the development of resistance to a broad spectrum of anticancer agents, termed multidrug resistance. An attractive strategy to overcome multidrug resistance is to block the transport function of ABC transporters leading to lethal intracellular concentrations of anticancer drugs. Efforts to identify transport inhibitors lead to a huge amount of chemical substances, none of which successfully passed clinical trials in cancer patients because of high toxicity. The search of natural products from traditional Chinese medicine may be more promising because natural products frequently are less toxic than chemically synthesized xenobiotics. Here, we give an overview of ABC transporters involved in multidrug resistance of cancer as well as Chinese herbs and phytochemicals showing inhibitory activity towards ABC transporters.