We assayed a number of food phytochemicals with reported PI3K inhibitory ability to identify candidates that can influence CDDP treatment outcomes in chemoresistant OVCA cell lines.
Our results indicate that FAK inhibition can suppress ovarian cancer cells migration and invasion through inhibiting downstream signaling (PI3K/AKT), which might be a therapeutic target or biomarker for ovarian cancer.
Dysregulation of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase/mammalian target of rapamycin (PI3K/mTOR) and RAS/extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) pathways is common in ovarian cancer, providing potential new targets for 2nd line therapy.
The phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway is one of the critical signaling cascades playing important roles in the chemoresistance of human cancer cells, including ovarian cancer.
PIK3CA, a catalytic subunit of PI3-kinase, is known to be activated in ovarian clear cell carcinoma (CCC), which is categorized as type I ovarian cancer.
Activation of the phosphatidylinositol 3' kinase (PI3K) pathway occurs in a significant fraction of both types of ovarian cancer, driven predominantly by mutations in type I and amplification in type II.
Here, we show that dual inhibition of PI3K/mTOR in ovarian cancer-spheroids leads to death of inner matrix-deprived cells, whereas matrix-attached cells are resistant.
We found no evidence of disease association for SNPs in BRAF, KRAS, ERBB2 and PIK3CA when OC was considered as a single disease phenotype; but after stratification by histological subtype, we found borderline evidence of association for SNPs in KRAS and BRAF with mucinous OC and in ERBB2 and PIK3CA with endometrioid OC.
The demonstration that p53 binds directly to the PIK3CA promoter and inhibits its activity identifies a novel mechanism whereby these two mediators regulate cellular functions, and whereby inactivation of p53 and subsequent upregulation of PIK3CA might contribute to the pathophysiology of ovarian cancer.
Sequence mutations and gene amplifications lead to activation of the PIK3CA-AKT2 signaling pathway and have been reported in several types of neoplasms including ovarian cancer.
Taken together, these data suggest that PTEN over-expression may represent a novel therapeutic approach for chemoresistant human ovarian cancer and that this may involve a p53-mediated apoptotic cascade independent of the PI3K/Akt pathway.