Multidrug Resistance Mechanism of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Multidrug resistance is recognized as the key factor of many anticancer drugs invalidity. Anticancer treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation must hit their cellular targets and then cause cellular alteration or damage. However, in most cases the damage inflicted by the anticancer agent triggers apoptosis 1. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most frequently occurring cancer in children. Chemotherapy to childhood ALL has markedly improved during the past years 2. The remission rate of chemotherapy patients is more than 95%, and the long term free survival rate about 75-80%. However, 25–30% of the patients will experience a relapsing, that leads to die of teenagers. Which may be explained by unfavourable pharmacokinetics, by leukemic stem cells regrowth and by cellular drug resistance 2, 3. Since the early 1970s, multidrug resistance (MDR) has been known to exist in cancer cells and is thought to be attributable to a membrane-bound, energy-dependent pump protein (Pglycoprotein [P-gp]) capable of excluding various related and unrelated chemotherapeutic drugs. In this chapter, we would discussed the multidrug resistance mechanism of cancer cell.