Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death that occurs in multicellular organisms. Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes (morphology) and death. These changes include blebbing, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, DNA fragmentation, and mRNA decay. The average adult human loses between 50 and 70 billion cells each day due to apoptosis. For an average human child between eight and fourteen years old, approximately twenty to thirty billion cells die per day.
Doxorubicin, sold under the brand name Adriamycin among others, is a chemotherapy medication used to treat cancer. This includes breast cancer, bladder cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma, lymphoma, and acute lymphocytic leukemia. It is often used together with other chemotherapy agents. Doxorubicin is given by injection into a vein.
Anthracyclines are a class of drugs used in cancer chemotherapy that are extracted from Streptomyces bacterium. These compounds are used to treat many cancers, including leukemias, lymphomas, breast, stomach, uterine, ovarian, bladder cancer, and lung cancers. The first anthracycline discovered was daunorubicin, which is produced naturally by Streptomyces peucetius, a species of Actinomycetota. Clinically the most important anthracyclines are doxorubicin, daunorubicin, epirubicin and idarubicin.
Etoposide, sold under the brand name Vepesid among others, is a chemotherapy medication used for the treatments of a number of types of cancer including testicular cancer, lung cancer, lymphoma, leukemia, neuroblastoma, and ovarian cancer. It is also used for hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis. It is used by mouth or injection into a vein.
Genistein (C15H10O5) is a naturally occurring compound that structurally belongs to a class of compounds known as isoflavones. It is described as an angiogenesis inhibitor and a phytoestrogen.
Betulinic acid is a naturally occurring pentacyclic triterpenoid which has antiretroviral, antimalarial, and anti-inflammatory properties, as well as a more recently discovered potential as an anticancer agent, by inhibition of topoisomerase. It is found in the bark of several species of plants, principally the white birch from which it gets its name, but also the ber tree, selfheal, the tropical carnivorous plants Triphyophyllum peltatum and Ancistrocladus heyneanus, Diospyros leucomelas, a member of the persimmon family, Tetracera boiviniana, the jambul, flowering quince, rosemary, and Pulsatilla chinensis.
Topoisomerase inhibitors are chemical compounds that block the action of topoisomerases, which are broken into two broad subtypes: type I topoisomerases (TopI) and type II topoisomerases (TopII). Topoisomerase plays important roles in cellular reproduction and DNA organization, as they mediate the cleavage of single and double stranded DNA to relax supercoils, untangle catenanes, and condense chromosomes in eukaryotic cells. Topoisomerase inhibitors influence these essential cellular processes. Some topoisomerase inhibitors prevent topoisomerases from performing DNA strand breaks while others, deemed topoisomerase poisons, associate with topoisomerase-DNA complexes and prevent the re-ligation step of the topoisomerase mechanism. These topoisomerase-DNA-inhibitor complexes are cytotoxic agents, as the un-repaired single- and double stranded DNA breaks they cause can lead to apoptosis and cell death. Because of this ability to induce apoptosis, topoisomerase inhibitors have gained interest as therapeutics against infectious and cancerous cells.
Survivin, also called baculoviral inhibitor of apoptosis repeat-containing 5 or BIRC5, is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the BIRC5 gene.
B-cell lymphoma-extra large (Bcl-xL), encoded by the BCL2-like 1 gene, is a transmembrane molecule in the mitochondria. It is a member of the Bcl-2 family of proteins, and acts as an anti-apoptotic protein by preventing the release of mitochondrial contents such as cytochrome c, which leads to caspase activation and ultimately, programmed cell death.
Inhibitors of apoptosis are a group of proteins that mainly act on the intrinsic pathway that block programmed cell death, which can frequently lead to cancer or other effects for the cell if mutated or improperly regulated. Many of these inhibitors act to block caspases, a family of cysteine proteases that play an integral role in apoptosis. Some of these inhibitors include the Bcl-2 family, viral inhibitor crmA, and IAP's.
Edelfosine is a synthetic alkyl-lysophospholipid (ALP). It has antineoplastic (anti-cancer) effects.
An Hsp90 inhibitor is a substance that inhibits that activity of the Hsp90 heat shock protein. Since Hsp90 stabilizes a variety of proteins required for survival of cancer cells, these substances may have therapeutic benefit in the treatment of various types of malignancies. Furthermore, a number of Hsp90 inhibitors are currently undergoing clinical trials for a variety of cancers. Hsp90 inhibitors include the natural products geldanamycin and radicicol as well as semisynthetic derivatives 17-N-Allylamino-17-demethoxygeldanamycin (17AAG).
HU-336 is a strongly antiangiogenic compound, significantly inhibiting angiogenesis at concentrations as low as 300 nM. It inhibits angiogenesis by directly inducing apoptosis of vascular endothelial cells without changing the expression of pro- and antiangiogenic cytokines and their receptors. HU-336 is highly effective against tumor xenografts in nude mice. Although it is technically the oxidized quinone of delta-8 THC, it is entirely non psychoactive.
HU-345 is a drug that is able to inhibit aortic ring angiogenesis more potently than its parent compound cannabinol (CBN). It exhibits no psychoactive effects on the body.
Anticancer genes are genes that, when ectopically overexpressed, specifically destroy tumour cells without harming normal, untransformed cells. This cellular destruction can be due to a variety of mechanisms, such as apoptosis, mitotic catastrophe followed by apoptosis or necrosis, and autophagy. Anticancer genes emerged from studies on cancer cells in the late 1990s. Currently, there have been 291 anticancer genes discovered in the human genome. In order to be classified as an anticancer gene, the gene must have base substitutions leading to missense amino-acid changes, deletions, or insertions leading to frameshifts that alter the protein the gene codes for, increases and decreases in copy-number increases, or gene rearrangements leading to their deregulation.
Antineoplastic resistance, often used interchangeably with chemotherapy resistance, is the resistance of neoplastic (cancerous) cells, or the ability of cancer cells to survive and grow despite anti-cancer therapies. In some cases, cancers can evolve resistance to multiple drugs, called multiple drug resistance.
Immunogenic cell death is any type of cell death eliciting an immune response. Both accidental cell death and regulated cell death can result in immune response. Immunogenic cell death contrasts to forms of cell death that do not elicit any response or even mediate immune tolerance.
Paraptosis is a type of programmed cell death, morphologically distinct from apoptosis and necrosis. The defining features of paraptosis are cytoplasmic vacuolation, independent of caspase activation and inhibition, and lack of apoptotic morphology. Paraptosis lacks several of the hallmark characteristics of apoptosis, such as membrane blebbing, chromatin condensation, and nuclear fragmentation. Like apoptosis and other types of programmed cell death, the cell is involved in causing its own death, and gene expression is required. This is in contrast to necrosis, which is non-programmed cell death that results from injury to the cell.
Vosaroxin is a topoisomerase II inhibitor causing site-selective DNA damage. It is under phase III clinical trial investigation for acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) and ovarian cancer sponsored by Sunesis.
Cytotrienin A is a secondary metabolite isolated from Streptomyces sp. RK95-74 isolated from soil in Japan in 1997. Cyt A is an ansamycin. Cytotrienin A induces apoptosis on HL-60 cells, as well as inhibiting translation in eukaryotes by inhibiting eukaryotic elongation factor 1A (eEF1A), which can act as an oncogene. These functions lead to the potential of the microbial metabolite acting as an anticancer agent, specifically for blood cancers, as it has proved to be more effective with leukemic cell lines. Cyt A is thought to induce apoptosis by activating c-Jun N-terminal Kinase (JNK), p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), and p36 myelin basic protein (MBP) kinase.
