Regulation of chemoresistance via alternative messenger RNA splicing

The acquisition of resistance to chemotherapy is a significant problem in the treatment of cancer, greatly increasing patient morbidity and mortality. Tumors are often sensitive to chemotherapy upon initial treatment, but repeated treatments can select for those cells that were able to survive initial therapy and have acquired cellular mechanisms to enhance their resistance to subsequent chemotherapy treatment. Many cellular mechanisms of drug resistance have been identified, most of which result from changes in gene and protein expression. While changes at the transcriptional level have been duly noted, it is primarily the post-transcriptional processing of pre-mRNA into mature mRNA that regulates the composition of the proteome and it is the proteome that actually regulates the cell's response to chemotherapeutic insult, inducing cell survival or death. During pre-mRNA processing, intronic non-protein-coding sequences are removed and protein-coding exons are spliced to form a continuous template for protein translation. Alternative splicing involves the differential inclusion or exclusion of exonic sequences into the mature transcript, generating different mRNA templates for protein production. This regulatory mechanism enables the potential to produce many different protein isoforms from the same gene. In this review I will explain the mechanism of alternative pre-mRNA splicing and look at some specific examples of how splicing factors, splicing factor kinases and alternative splicing of specific pre-mRNAs from genes have been shown to contribute to acquisition of the drug resistant phenotype.