The recent progress of peptide regulators for the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway

Nan Zhang; Huaxing Shen; Baobao Chen; Honggang Hu; Chao Liu; Yan Chen; Wei Cong

doi:10.3389/fmed.2023.1164656

The recent progress of peptide regulators for the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway

Front Med (Lausanne). 2023 Jun 16:10:1164656. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2023.1164656. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Nan Zhang^#¹, Huaxing Shen^#¹, Baobao Chen¹, Honggang Hu¹, Chao Liu¹, Yan Chen², Wei Cong¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Medicine or Institute of Translational Medicine, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China.
² Department of Pharmacy, Medical Supplies Center of People's Liberation Army (PLA) General Hospital, Beijing, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Wnt signaling plays an important role in many biological processes such as stem cell self-renewal, cell proliferation, migration, and differentiation. The β-catenin-dependent signaling pathway mainly regulates cell proliferation, differentiation, and migration. In the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway, the Wnt family ligands transduce signals through LRP5/6 and Frizzled receptors to the Wnt/β-catenin signaling cascades. Wnt-targeted therapy has garnered extensive attention. The most commonly used approach in targeted therapy is small-molecule regulators. However, it is difficult for small-molecule regulators to make great progress due to their inherent defects. Therapeutic peptide regulators targeting the Wnt signaling pathway have become an alternative therapy, promising to fill the gaps in the clinical application of small-molecule regulators. In this review, we describe recent advances in peptide regulators for Wnt/β-catenin signaling.

Keywords: Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway; biologics; peptide regulators; peptide regulators for Wnt/β-catenin; recent progress; small molecular drugs.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

This research was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2021YFC2100201), the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 22077078), and the Shanghai Committee of Science and Technology of China (Nos. 221409003002, 2140900302, and 22140900303).