Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2021. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Aug 14, 2021; 27(30): 4963-4984
Published online Aug 14, 2021. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v27.i30.4963
Stress-activated kinases as therapeutic targets in pancreatic cancer
Benno Traub, Aileen Roth, Marko Kornmann, Uwe Knippschild, Joachim Bischof
Benno Traub, Aileen Roth, Marko Kornmann, Uwe Knippschild, Joachim Bischof, Department of General and Visceral Surgery, Ulm University Hospital, Ulm 89081, Germany
Author contributions: Traub B, Roth A, and Bischof J prepared the original draft of the manuscript; Traub B, Roth A, Kornmann M, Knippschild U, and Bischof J reviewed the manuscript and prepared the final draft of the publication; Traub B and Bischof J created the figures and tables; Traub B, Knippschild U, and Bischof J collected funding; All authors have read and approve the final manuscript.
Supported by German Research Foundation (DFG), No. TR1663/1-1 and No. KN356/9-1; and Else Kröner-Fresenius-Stiftung, No. 2017_A142.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflict of interests for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Uwe Knippschild, PhD, Professor, Department of General and Visceral Surgery, Ulm University Hospital, Albert-Einstein-Allee 23, Ulm 89081, Germany. uwe.knippschild@uniklinik-ulm.de
Received: January 28, 2021
Peer-review started: January 28, 2021
First decision: May 2, 2021
Revised: May 17, 2021
Accepted: July 20, 2021
Article in press: July 20, 2021
Published online: August 14, 2021
Core Tip

Core Tip: Since pancreatic cancer patients are generally confronted with poor prognosis, optimized therapeutic strategies are urgently needed. To establish new treatment options, efforts in drug development have increasingly focused on targeting protein kinases. In the cellular response to various stress signals, c-Jun N-terminal kinases (JNK) and p38 kinases as well as members of the casein kinase 1 (CK1) family are of special interest. Concentrating on pancreatic carcinoma in this review, we summarize the key roles of JNK, p38, and CK1 and provide an overview of recent achievements in the development of small molecule kinase inhibitors against these kinases.