The influence of EGF/HGF signaling crosstalk on therapy resistance in NSCLC cell lines

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Therapeutic treatment of NSCLC includes mainly chemotherapy due to high metastatic spread but recently also targeted therapy using epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI) for patients with an EGFR-activating mutation. Although patients benefit from this treatment, the NSCLC cancer develops a resistance against EGFR TKI treatment and recovers after a few months. Besides the gatekeeper mutation T790 M in EGFR, the resistance can be mediated by hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) overexpression an…