Patent survey on chemosensitizers (2015–2019)

Abstract

Abstract Chemotherapy represents the gold standard method for cancer treatment during the past decades. However, many commercially available cytotoxic drugs suffer from chemoresistance, which results in lowering the therapeutic efficacy of drugs, cancer recurrence, progression, and metastasis with a subsequent decline in the overall survival rate of cancer patients. This discrepancy raises the demand for developing novel approaches to enhance the sensitivity of resistant tumor cells to chemotherapeutic drugs, a process known by chemosensitization. In this chapter, we discuss the various drug-resistant mechanisms developed within the tumor cells along with their implications for chemotherapy. Chemoresistance is particularly driven by a group of regulatory proteins and biological pathways, which either promote drug efflux, induce DNA damage repair mechanisms, or inhibit apoptosis. We also present herein the recent inventions describing the successful design of different classes of small molecule chemosensitizers, and their significant role in counteracting the cancer cells’ inherent drug resistance mechanisms, rendering them capable of either eliciting a cytotoxic effect on their own or synergistically acting with existing chemotherapeutic drugs toward maximizing the therapeutic outcome, enhancing tumor regression while minimizing the unwanted toxic side effects associated with chemotherapy administration.