Changing the Landscape of Solid Tumor Therapy from Apoptosis-Promoting to Apoptosis-Inhibiting Strategies

Abstract

The many limitations of implementing anticancer strategies under the term “precision oncology” have been extensively discussed. While some authors propose promising future directions, others are less optimistic and use phrases such as illusion, hype, and false hypotheses. The reality is revealed by practicing clinicians and cancer patients in various online publications, one of which has stated that “in the quest for the next cancer cure, few researchers bother to look back at the graveyard of failed medicines to figure out what went wrong”. The message is clear: Novel therapeutic strategies with catchy names (e.g., synthetic “lethality”) have not fulfilled their promises despite decades of extensive research and clinical trials. The main purpose of this review is to discuss key challenges in solid tumor therapy that surprisingly continue to be overlooked by the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death (NCCD) and numerous other authors. These challenges include: The impact of chemotherapy-induced genome chaos (e.g., multinucleation) on resistance and relapse, oncogenic function of caspase 3, cancer cell anastasis (recovery from late stages of apoptosis), and pitfalls of ubiquitously used preclinical chemosensitivity assays (e.g., cell “viability” and tumor growth delay studies in live animals) that score such pro-survival responses as “lethal” events. The studies outlined herein underscore the need for new directions in the management of solid tumors.