Casting light on molecular events underlying anti-cancer drug treatment: what can be seen from the proteomics point of view?

Regardless of continuous advances in technology and expansion of the knowledge in the field of genomic information, cancer still remains one of the leading causes of death in developed countries for many reasons, including non-selectiveness of commonly used anti-cancer drugs that often influence non-specific rather than tumour-specific targets. As cancer cells are characterized by the ability to divide and multiply in an uncontrolled manner whereby a set of specific proteins modulate cell division processes, proteomics seems to be a suitable tool for seeking out molecular mediators of anti-cancer drugs action and resistance, thus improving chemotherapy outcome. This review will focus on the recent knowledge of the molecular mechanisms involved in the anti-cancer drugs response revealed by the proteomics tools. In addition, we will touch upon the effects of ‘ ‘ gene drugs’ ’ with p53 and p21waf1/cip1 genes on the protein complement of tumour cells assessed by the two-dimensional gel electrophoresis combined with mass spectrometry. Such studies could substantially contribute to further drug optimization prior to its clinical use and represent an important but still small step in the long way of drug discovery. However, fluctuations in protein expression, distribution, posttranslational modifications, interactions, functions and compartmentalization make it difficult to use exclusively expression proteomics data without putting it in broader biological context. Thus, the challenge today is to shift from the identification of drug response and disease biomarkers to more time-consuming process of revealing the biochemical mechanism that connects a specific protein with a disease or cellular response to a drug.