The Role of Proteasome Inhibition in Nonsmall Cell Lung Cancer

Abstract EN

Lung cancer therapy with current available chemotherapeutic agents is mainly palliative.

For these and other reasons there is now a great interest to find targeted therapies that can be effective not only palliating lung cancer or decreasing treatment-related toxicity, but also giving hope to cure these patients.

It is already well known that the ubiquitin-proteasome system like other cellular pathways is critical for the proliferation and survival of cancer cells; thus, proteosome inhibition has become a very attractive anticancer therapy.

There are several phase I and phase II clinical trials now in non-small cell lung cancer and small cell lung cancer using this potential target.

Most of the trials use bortezomib in combination with chemotherapeutic agents.

This paper tends to make a state-of-the-art review based on the available literature regarding the use of bortezomib as a single agent or in combination with chemotherapy in patients with lung cancer.