Novel Therapeutic Approaches to Target Drug Resistant Tumors

Drug resistance is still a not to be overlooked complication in the field of oncology making successful cancer treatment regimens a real challenge. It occurs in all cancer types and in all treatments, including targeted therapy, immunotherapy, and chemotherapy. the underlying mechanisms behind drug resistance are diverse and often co-exist between tumor bulks. The most important ones are the following: reduced drug uptake or increased drug extrusion, changes in the survival apoptotic pathways, increased ability of DNA repair, metabolism rewiring, and changes in tumor microenvironment. Drug resistance can be intrinsic (primary) like for cancers that do not respond to the treatment from the beginning or it can be acquired (secondary) when treatment works at the beginning but kills only part of the tumor cells, leaving the unresponsive cancer cells alive, and resulting in therapy failure in the end. To limit the occurrence of drug resistance, cancers are treated with various drug combinations, but the outcome remains poor for many tumors. As a result, it is crucial to understand the evolution and mechanisms behind drug resistance in specific cancers, thus allowing the ad hoc design of new drugs able, to prevent or/and contrast primary or secondary drug resistance.

This Research Topic aims to provide an overview of the current state of the art ways to overcome drug resistance, focus on newly designed drugs and combined treatments as well as new strategies that can target drug resistance or show a particular efficiency against drug resistant cells.

This Topic will welcome Original Research and Review articles focusing on, but not limited to the following themes:

• Newly designed drugs that target cancers.

• New cancer drug formulations.

• New therapeutic combinations to be tested and applied for the treatment of different cancers.

Important note: All manuscripts submitted to this collection will need to follow the Guidelines for the conception/peer-review of submissions of the Experimental Pharmacology and Drug Discovery Section. Studies carried out with crude extracts/multiherbal preparations or Original Research based solely on in silico techniques will not be considered for review.