MINI REVIEW article
Front. Pharmacol.
Sec. Experimental Pharmacology and Drug Discovery
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fphar.2025.1636326
This article is part of the Research TopicExploiting Non-Oncogene Addiction for Overcoming Drug Resistance in Metastatic TumorsView all 4 articles
COPZ1: an example of non-oncogene addiction in human tumors
Provisionally accepted
- Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy
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Non-oncogene addiction (NOA) indicates that tumor cell growth/survival requires the activity of genes/pathways not oncogenic per sé, and dispensable for normal cells. NOA genes provide a wide repertoire of novel therapeutic exploitable tumor vulnerabilities. A large body of evidence demonstrates the dependency of several tumors such as breast, prostate, ovary and thyroid, glioblastoma and LUAD, on the activity of COPZ1, a component of the heptameric COPI complex.Thus, COPZ1 is emerging as a potential novel therapeutic target for tumors of different origin. In different tumor models COPZ1 inhibition was found implicated in abortive autophagy, ER stress and activation of ferroptosis. In this review we summarize the different studies characterizing COPZ1 as a NOA gene in different tumor types, and discuss potential issues related to its targeting.
Keywords: non-oncogene addiction, COPZ1, COPI, cancer target, Cancer vulnerability
Received: 27 May 2025; Accepted: 07 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Di Marco, Vergaro and Greco. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Angela Greco, Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy
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