Scientists have made progress in the quantitative study of the sensitivity of tumor cells to pro apoptotic proteins

Recently, Dai Haiming, a researcher at the center of medical physics and technology, Hefei Institute of material science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, established a new method for quantitative measurement of tumor cell tolerance to proteins containing only BH3 domain The related results were published on cell death and differentiation under the title of measurements of BH3 only protein tolerance In the process of antitumor drugs (chemotherapy drugs and molecular targeted drugs) killing tumor cells, mitochondrial cell apoptosis pathway plays an important role Most of the cancer cell death caused by anti-tumor drugs is related to the apoptosis pathway The deletion or mutation of the apoptosis pathway of mitochondrial cells will lead to the drug resistance of tumor cells Antitumor drugs often cause tumor cell death by regulating BH3 domain protein alone For example, bortezomib, a molecular targeted drug, causes tumor cell death by up regulating noxa and Bim in tumor cells; rapamycin, an inhibitor of mTOR, causes tumor cell death by up regulating Bim and puma Moreover, because of the different expression levels of the regulatory network of cell death proteins in different tumor cells, some tumor cells are resistant to one or more targeted drugs; some tumor cells are resistant to some molecular targeted drugs, and sensitive to other molecular targeted drugs; currently, there is no perfect method to predict the drug sensitivity of tumor cells Although these BH3 only proteins are very important in the process of tumor cell death induced by antitumor drugs, there is still no way to quantitatively measure the tolerance of tumor cells to BH3 only proteins In the study, daiheming's team, in cooperation with researchers from Mayo Medical College, established an absolute quantitative measurement method for the tolerance value of tumor cells to proteins with BH3 domain only, and tested the tolerance value of a variety of tumor cells to proteins with BH3 domain only It was also found that the tolerance of tumor cells to BH3 domain protein only depended on the expression level of anti apoptotic protein in the cells rather than BH3 domain protein in the cells This method can also be used to predict the combination of several antitumor drugs The research is supported by the 100 person Program Fund of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.