Development of novel strategies for cancer therapy by using the inducer of the atypical cell death parthanatos

Abstract

Parthanatos is a newly discovered non-apoptotic cell death mediated by the stress-sensing protein PARP-1. However, there are few effective inducers of parthanatos, and thus we screened and identified novel parthanatos inducers. Among them, antibiotic X possesses interesting properties as a parthanatos inducer that selectively executes parthanatos in cancer cells lacking the tumor suppressor protein STK11 (serine/threonine kinase 11), but not normal cells. Therefore, our results suggest that antibiotic X works as a novel anticancer agent that targets cancer cells expressing loss-of-function mutants of STK11.