Heike Niessner, Jennifer Schmitz, Ghazaleh Tabatabai, Andreas M Schmid, Carsten Calaminus, Tobias Sinnberg, Benjamin Weide, Thomas K Eigentler, Claus Garbe, Birgit Schittek, Leticia Quintanilla-Fend, Benjamin Bender, Marion Mai, Christian Praetorius, Stefan Beissert, Gabriele Schackert, Michael H Muders, Matthias Meinhardt, Gustavo B Baretton, Reinhard Dummer, Keith Flaherty, Bernd J Pichler, Dagmar Kulms, Dana Westphal, Friedegund Meier
PURPOSE: Great advances have recently been made in treating patients with metastatic melanoma. However, existing therapies are less effective on cerebral than extracerebral metastases. This highlights the potential role of the brain environment on tumor progression and drug resistance and underlines the need for "brain-specific" therapies. We previously showed that the PI3K-AKT survival pathway is hyperactivated in brain but not extracerebral melanoma metastases and that astrocyte-conditioned medium activates AKT in melanoma cells in vitro We therefore tested the PI3K inhibitor buparlisib as an antitumor agent for melanoma brain metastases...
December 1, 2016: Clinical Cancer Research: An Official Journal of the American Association for Cancer Research