Purine Signaling and Metabolism in Tumors

Dear Colleagues,

Cancer continues to be a serious health problem and one of the most common causes of mortality worldwide, despite the continued adoption of new therapeutic strategies and innovative agents. Therapeutic insufficiency is due to the enormous variety of biological processes involved in the growth of a tumor, which can coexist or activate when necessary to favor its expansion/recurrence. Furthermore, cancer cells have a remarkable ability to implement adaptive strategies to escape even the most effective treatments. Therefore, an understanding of this complex machinery and the discovery of molecules capable of hindering/contrasting the growth mechanisms of cancer is crucial, thus providing new therapeutic opportunities.

Today, there is a renewed interest in purines in oncology. They are ancestral and ubiquitous molecules present in virtually all cell types and are indispensable for the proliferation of cancer cells. Therefore, synthetic analogues of purines, which act as antimetabolites, have been and are still being used for the treatment of various cancers. However, growing evidence has highlighted that high levels of purines, in particular ATP and adenosine, are present in the tumor microenvironment, where, interacting as signal molecules with their specific receptors, they influence not only tumor growth but also tumor–host interaction and immune function in several ways. Furthermore, dysregulation of enzymes that degrade ATP/adenosine has been reported in extracellular tumor fluid. All of these results are promoting research to add new knowledge into purine receptor activity and metabolism in order to find purine receptor ligands and/or purine analogues/metabolites capable of suppressing tumor cell growth.

The purpose of this Special Issue dedicated to “Purine Signaling and Metabolism in Tumors” is to attract the interest of those scientists who are investigating the above-mentioned aspects. This Special Issue should represent an update of research on purines in oncology and hopefully gather new discoveries about these compounds to translate into new anticancer therapies.

Prof. Renata Ciccarelli
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cells is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.