Cancer is one of the main causes of death worldwide. Despite the significant development of methods of cancer healing during the past decades, chemotherapy still remains the main method for cancer treatment. Depending on the mechanism of action, commonly used chemotherapeutic agents can be divided into several classes (antimetabolites, alkylating agents, mitotic spindle inhibitors, topoisomerase inhibitors, and others). Multidrug resistance (MDR) is responsible for over 90% of deaths in cancer patients receiving traditional chemotherapeutics or novel targeted drugs. The mechanisms of MDR include elevated metabolism of xenobiotics, enhanced efflux of drugs, growth factors, increased DNA repair capacity, and genetic factors (gene mutations, amplifications, and epigenetic alterations). Rapidly increasing numbers of biomedical studies are focused on designing chemotherapeutics that are able to evade or reverse MDR. The aim of this review is not only to demonstrate the latest data on the mechanisms of cellular resistance to anticancer agents currently used in clinical treatment but also to present the mechanisms of action of novel potential antitumor drugs which have been designed to overcome these resistance mechanisms. Better understanding of the mechanisms of MDR and targets of novel chemotherapy agents should provide guidance for future research concerning new effective strategies in cancer treatment.
Multidrug resistance (MDR) of cancer cells to cytostatic agents is the major obstacle for the succesfull chemotherapy. One of the causes of the development of cellular resistanc...
Multidrug resistance (MDR) has been reported in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, underscoring the challenge of design and screening of more efficacious new drugs. For instance, ...
The MDR-1 gene product, plasma membrane glycoprotein or P-glycoprotein (PGP), has been shown to confer drug resistance to cancer cells by acting as an energy-dependent drug-effl...
P‐glycoprotein (P‐gp) is a cell membrane—associated protein that transports a variety of drug substrates. Although P‐gp has been studied extensively as a mediator of multidrug r...
The acronym ESKAPE includes six nosocomial pathogens that exhibit multidrug resistance and virulence: <i>Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acin...
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