A phase 0 clinical trial of riluzole as a single agent in patients with melanoma resulted in involution of tumors associated with inhibition of both the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and phophoinositide-3-kinase/AKT (PI3K/AKT) pathways in 34% of patients.
Akt, a signaling molecule downstream of PI3K, was introduced into the radial growth WM35 melanoma in order to test whether Akt overexpression is sufficient to accomplish this transformation.
Although PI3K inhibition resulted in cytostatic effects on xenografted NRAS<sup>Q61H</sup> /PIK3CA<sup>H1047R</sup> melanoma, combined inhibition of MEK1/2 plus PI3K elicited significant melanoma regression.
Although activation of the PI3K/Akt pathway resulting from genetic mutations and epigenetic deregulation of its major regulators is known to cause resistance of melanoma to therapeutic agents, including the conventional chemotherapeutic drug dacarbazine and the Food and Drug Administration-approved mutant BRAF inhibitors vemurafenib and dabrafenib, the role of extracellular stimuli of the pathway, such as insulin, in drug resistance of melanoma remains less understood.
Among the possible targets in melanoma are the Ras-MAPK and PI3K/AKT signal transduction pathways, the proteasome, histone deacetylases, methyltransferases, and melanoma-induced angiogenesis.
Among them, the RAS/RAF/MEK/ERK (MAPK) and PI3K/AKT (AKT) signalling pathways are activated through multiple mechanisms and appear to play a major role in melanoma development and progression.
Brain metastases are the most common cause of death in patients with metastatic melanoma, and the RAF-MEK-ERK and PI3K-AKT signaling pathways are key players in melanoma progression and drug resistance.
CCGs are enriched in Wnt, PI3K, MAPK and netrin signaling pathway components and are more highly connected to one another than predicted by chance, indicating that SB targets cooperative genetic networks in melanoma.
Collectively, our results indicated that Lyn plays a carcinogenic role in multiple cellular functions during melanoma development through regulating apoptosis and autophagy via the PI3K/Akt pathway and may be a valuable potential target for the clinical treatment of melanoma.
Current genetically-engineered mouse melanoma models are often based on <i>Tyr::CreER<sup>T2</sup></i>-controlled MAPK pathway activation by the BRAF<sup>V600E</sup> mutation and PI3K pathway activation by loss of PTEN.
Downregulation of FOXM1 by siRNA significantly inhibited the proliferation of melanoma cells, and blockade of the MAPK and PI3K/AKT pathways decreased the FOXM1 expression in melanoma cell lines.
Finally, we describe findings of high translational significance by demonstrating that Abl/Arg cooperate with PI3K/Akt/PTEN, a parallel pathway that is associated with intrinsic resistance to BRAFi and immunotherapy, as Abl/Arg and Akt inhibitors cooperate to prevent viability, cell cycle progression and in vivo growth of melanomas harboring mutant BRAF/PTEN.
Functional analyses of differentially expressed genes (DEGs), obtained from the GEO (Gene Expression Omnibus) database, indicated that high proliferative and metastatic abilities are the main characteristics of melanoma and that the PI3K and MAPK pathways play essential roles in melanoma progression.
Gab2 is an adaptor protein that potentiates the activation of the Ras-Erk and PI3K-Akt pathways and has recently been implicated in human cancer; however, its role in melanoma has not been explored.
Here, we show that constitutive activation of the small GTPase ARF6 (ARF6<sup>Q67L</sup>) is sufficient to accelerate metastasis in mice with BRAF<sup>V600E</sup>/Cdkn2a<sup>NULL</sup> melanoma at a similar incidence and severity to <i>Pten</i> loss, a major driver of PI3K activation and melanoma metastasis.
Herein, we examined whether targeting the RAS-RAF-MEK-ERK pathway with the RAF inhibitor sorafenib and/or the PI3K-AKT-mTOR pathway with the mTOR inhibitor rapamycin has therapeutic effects against melanoma.
However, PI3K pathway mutations, though more heterogeneous, were present in 41% of the melanoma, with PTEN being the highest mutated PI3K gene in melanomas (22%).