Zhu et al. [64] reported that advanced hepatocellular carcinoma patients with high serum levels of IL-8 and IL-6 were of high mortality and rapid tumor progression after sunitinib.
On the other hand, patients with a decrease level of IL-6 had better PFS and overall survival. Additionally, during sunitinib treatment, a more elevated IL-6 level was in correspondence with higher hazard of mortality or immediate progression. ARs are a family of G protein-coupled receptors, also called serpentine receptors whose ligands mainly include chemokines and neurotransmitters [31]. Since the expression of β-ARs was observed in human lung adenocarcinoma A549 cells [65, 66], only an immunohistochemical analysis for β-ARs in B16F1 cells was carried out. Hegener et al. [65] also found that the internalization and endocytosis PND-1186 cell line of β2-AR in A549 cells were stimulated by terbutaline (selective β2-AR agonist) and forskolin (cAMP analogs), whereas blocked by propranolol. In our study, the strong expression of β-ARs located in the cytoplasma and there was no difference of staining intensity between β1-AR and β2-AR discerned with naked eyes. This finding in our study provided the basis for following research on the β-AR/cAMP/PKA pathway in B16F1 cells. Considering
ARs play a key role mediating the effect on tumors induced by chronic stress and endow tumor cells the potential to respond to neurotransmitters, few scholars suggest the receptor-based interference of intracellular ARs signaling pathway as KPT-8602 concentration a new approach to resist this effect [9, 42, 67, 68]. Powe et al. [69] found, in breast cancer, β2-AR strongly immunoreactive in cases with a luminal phenotype and Calpain good clinic outcome while α1b-AR and α2c-AR over-expressed in basal-like phenotypes of poor prognosis. So ARs
might be supposed to be potential predictors for survival and probable indicators for targeted therapy with AR blockers. In the present research, it was approved in A549 cells that the NE-induced up-regulation in both protein and gene levels of VEGF, IL-8 and IL-6 was chiefly mediated by β-AR/cAMP/PKA signaling pathway which had been found to play a key role in mouse xenografts of melanoma and ovarian cancer [9, 17]. The stimulation of β-ARs by neurotransmitters induces multiple signaling pathways of which the most important one approved is cAMP/PKA/CREB (cAMP response element binding protein). Then the activation of CREB, a transcription factor, initiates the arachidonic acid cascade, the Src/STAT and the EGFR pathways followed by a wide variety of biological effects [9, 70]. Conclusions Taken together, our data support the hypothesis that exogenous norepinephrine gives rise to the attenuation in the efficacy of sunitinib in a mouse melanoma model and provide a reason for the discrepancy of the efficacy of anti-angiogenic drugs between clinical and HKI-272 chemical structure preclinical results.