Minireview: Familiar faces in unfamiliar places: The emerging role of nuclear receptors in lung cancer

Abstract

Nuclear hormone receptors (NRs) are a superfamily of 48 transcription factors that are frequently modulated by ligands and control various cancer-relevant cellular pathways, such as differentiation, proliferation, migration, and metabolism. These properties make them excellent therapeutic targets in cancers dependent upon their activity, and as such, 3 NRs, estrogen receptor-α, androgen receptor, and retinoic acid receptor-α (more specifically, the promyelocytic leukemia-retinoic acid receptor-α translocation), have been targeted clinically in breast cancer, prostate cancer, and acute promyelocytic leukemia, respectively. Recently, a number of studies have highlighted a putative role for NRs in nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a highly lethal type of lung cancer with relatively few targeted agents. Here, we review the potential roles of selected NRs in NSCLC and offer insights on how NRs may be leveraged in NSCLC to improve patient outcomes.