Predicting and Overcoming Taxane Chemoresistance

Taxanes are microtubule-targeting drugs used as cytotoxic chemotherapy to treat most solid tumors. The development of resistance to taxanes is a major cause of therapeutic failure and overcoming chemoresistance remains an important challenge to improve patient's outcome. Extensive efforts have been made recently to identify predictive biomarkers to select populations of patients who will benefit from taxane-based chemotherapy and avoid inefficient treatment of patients with innate resistance. This, together with the discovery of new mechanisms of resistance that include metabolic reprogramming and dialogue between tumor and its microenvironment, pave the way to a new era of personalized medicine. In this review, we recapitulate recent insights into taxane resistance and present promising emerging strategies to overcome chemoresistance in the future.