title: Understanding the Genetic Mechanisms of Cancer Drug Resistance Using Genomic Approaches.
abstract: A major obstacle in precision cancer medicine is the inevitable resistance to targeted therapies. Tremendous effort and progress has been made over the past few years to understand the biochemical and genetic mechanisms underlying drug resistance, with the goal to eventually overcome such daunting challenges. Diverse mechanisms, such as secondary mutations, oncogene bypass, and epigenetic alterations, can all lead to drug resistance, and the number of known involved genes is growing rapidly, thus providing many possibilities to overcome resistance. The finding of these mechanisms and genes invariably requires the application of genomic and functional genomic approaches to tumors or cancer models. In this review, we briefly highlight the major drug-resistance mechanisms known today, and then focus primarily on the technological approaches leading to the advancement of this field.
authors.affiliation: BIOPIC and College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
authors.forename: Xueda
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: BIOPIC and College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China; Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China. Electronic address: zemin@pku.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Zemin
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D019008:Drug Resistance, Neoplasm / Q000187:drug effects / Q000235:genetics*; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans
keywords: cancer genome; drug-resistance mechanisms; functional genomic screening