Cancer has become a leading cause of death and constitutes an enormous burdenworldwide.Radiation is a principle treatment modality used alone or in combination with other forms of therapy,with 50%–70%of cancer patien...Cancer has become a leading cause of death and constitutes an enormous burdenworldwide.Radiation is a principle treatment modality used alone or in combination with other forms of therapy,with 50%–70%of cancer patients receiving radiotherapy at some point during their illness.It has been suggested that traditional radiotherapy(daily fractions of approximately 1.8–2 Gy over several weeks)might select for radioresistant tumor cell sub-populations,which,if not sterilized,give rise to local treatment failure and distant metastases.Thus,the challenge is to develop treatment strategies and schedules to eradicate the resistant subpopulation of tumorigenic cells rather than the predominant sensitive tumor cell population.With continued technological advances including enhanced conformal treatment technology,radiation oncologists can increasinglymaximize the dose to tumors while sparing adjacent normal tissues,to limit toxicity and damage to the latter.Increased dose conformality also facilitates changes in treatment schedules,such as changes in dose per treatment fraction and number of treatment fractions,to enhance the therapeutic ratio.For example,the recently developed large dose per fraction treatment schedules(hypofractionation)have shown clinical advantage over conventional treatment schedules in some tumor types.Experimental studies suggest that following large acute doses of radiation,recurrent tumors,presumably sustained by the most resistant tumor cell populations,may in fact be equally or more radiation sensitive than the primary tumor.In this review,we summarize the related advances in radiotherapy,including the increasing understanding of the molecular mechanisms of radioresistance,and the targeting of thesemechanisms with potent small molecule inhibitors,whichmay selectively sensitize tumor cells to radiation.展开更多
基金The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.81672386)the Scitech R&D Program of Sichuan Province(2020YFS0276).
文摘Cancer has become a leading cause of death and constitutes an enormous burdenworldwide.Radiation is a principle treatment modality used alone or in combination with other forms of therapy,with 50%–70%of cancer patients receiving radiotherapy at some point during their illness.It has been suggested that traditional radiotherapy(daily fractions of approximately 1.8–2 Gy over several weeks)might select for radioresistant tumor cell sub-populations,which,if not sterilized,give rise to local treatment failure and distant metastases.Thus,the challenge is to develop treatment strategies and schedules to eradicate the resistant subpopulation of tumorigenic cells rather than the predominant sensitive tumor cell population.With continued technological advances including enhanced conformal treatment technology,radiation oncologists can increasinglymaximize the dose to tumors while sparing adjacent normal tissues,to limit toxicity and damage to the latter.Increased dose conformality also facilitates changes in treatment schedules,such as changes in dose per treatment fraction and number of treatment fractions,to enhance the therapeutic ratio.For example,the recently developed large dose per fraction treatment schedules(hypofractionation)have shown clinical advantage over conventional treatment schedules in some tumor types.Experimental studies suggest that following large acute doses of radiation,recurrent tumors,presumably sustained by the most resistant tumor cell populations,may in fact be equally or more radiation sensitive than the primary tumor.In this review,we summarize the related advances in radiotherapy,including the increasing understanding of the molecular mechanisms of radioresistance,and the targeting of thesemechanisms with potent small molecule inhibitors,whichmay selectively sensitize tumor cells to radiation.
