Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor Pathways in Cancer: From Psychiatric Clues to Therapeutic Opportunities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The prevalence of cancer poses significant challenges to treatment, largely because of drug resistance along with other side effects. Current studies have been investigating the growth factors more than other biologic tumor features, such as neurobiologic features. Here in this review, we highlight the role of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) in cancer development with their context-dependent activation and downstream effectors. RECENT FINDINGS: Some nAChR subtypes stimulate tumorigenic pathways, EGFR/ERK1/2, PI3K/AKT, and MAPK, with varying responses based on the receptor subtype and tissue type. Notably, the Src kinase and MAPK pathways are common downstream effectors in lung, breast, and prostate cancers despite the variations in the predominant nAChR subunits in each cancer: α7 in lung, α9 in breast, and likely α5 and α7 in prostate tumors. CONCLUSION: These findings underscore the importance of targeting nAChRs in a context-specific manner to modulate shared signaling pathways, particularly the acetylcholine-stimulated Src/MAPK pathway. This review also calls for more investigation on other neurotransmitters and potential common pathways, as implicated by psychological reports, to advance the understanding of cancer biology and therapies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".