Mighty mTOR. Should we fight it to cure cancer?

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Medicine - Medical Frontiers and Special Areas, grade: A, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (School of Biomedical Sciences), course: Cancer and Inflammation, language: English, abstract: When thinking about signalling pathways involved in cancer, p53 and src usually come to mind first. However, with the genomics and metabolomics progress new pro- and anti-oncogenic mechanisms are described every day. And one signalling pathway stand out as the most promising candidate for research. It seems like mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) regulates everything . It is involved in a whole range crucial processes on cell and organism levels: cell cycle, glycolysis, lipogenesis, gene transcription and protein translation, autophagy and immune cells specialization. mTOR as serine/threonine protein kinase belongs to the phosphoinositide-3-kinaserelated family. Being a signalling kinase its mechanism of regulation is altering the protein s substrate recognition via phosphorylation.