Pharmacological activation of tumor suppressor, wild-type p53 as a promising strategy to fight cancer

A powerful tumor suppressor - p53 protein is a transcription factor which plays a critical role in eliciting cellular responses to a variety of stress signals, including DNA damage, hypoxia and aberrant proliferative signals, such as oncogene activation. Since its discovery thirty one years ago, p53 has been connected to tumorigenesis as it accumulates in the transformed tumor cells. Cellular stress induces stabilization of p53 and promotes, depending on the stress level, cell cycle arrest or apoptosis in the irreversibly damaged cells. The p53 protein is found inactive in more than 50% of human tumors either by enhanced proteasomal degradation or due to the inactivating point mutations in its gene. Numerous data indicate that low molecular weight compounds, identified by molecular modeling or in the functional, cell-based assays, efficiently activate non-mutated p53 in cancer cells which in consequence leads to their elimination due to p53-dependent apoptosis. In this work we describe the structure and cellular function of p53 as well as the latest discoveries on the compounds with high anti-tumor activities aiming at reactivation of the tumor suppressor function of p53.