ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Pharmacol.
Sec. Pharmacology of Anti-Cancer Drugs
This article is part of the Research TopicDrug Repurposing: The New Frontier in Fighting CancerView all articles
Exploratory Research on Therapeutic Agents Combined with Early Diagnostic Biomarkers for Colorectal Cancer
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Medical Informatics and Computer, Zhengzhou Health College, Zhengzhou, China
- 2Henan University, Kaifeng, China
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Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. While diagnostic and therapeutic strategies have advanced, the molecular mechanisms driving CRC pathogenesis are not fully understood, underscoring the need for novel biomarkers and therapeutic agents. Through integrated bioinformatics analysis of datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), we identified 15 survival-associated differentially expressed genes (DEGs) (|log2FC| > 1.5, *p* < 0.05) as potential early diagnostic biomarkers for CRC: MELK, NFE2L3, MCM2, MAD2L1, AUNIP, CXCL3, GLDN, GREM2, ALDH1A1, CILP, FABP4, AOC3, CNN1, ANGPTL1, and DES. Leveraging these key genes, we employed the L1000FWD, DGIdb, and CMap platforms to screen for promising small-molecule drugs. This approach identified SB-225002 as a candidate therapeutic agent, which was further validated by molecular docking simulations demonstrating its high binding affinity to multiple target proteins. Cellular viability assays demonstrated that SB-225002 exerted dose-dependent inhibition on the proliferation of CRC cell lines (SW-480, DLD-1, and MC 38), with IC50 values of 2.307 μM, 0.9456 μM, and 3.449 μM respectively, confirming its potent anti-proliferative activity at low concentrations. Our study systematically characterizes a novel panel of early-detection biomarkers for CRC and proposes SB-225002 as a repurposed candidate for CRC therapy.
Keywords: colorectal cancer, differential expressed genes, drug screening, molecular docking, biomarkers
Received: 11 Oct 2025; Accepted: 02 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liao, Xue, Yu, Liu, Yu, Cheng, Zhang and Ji. 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:
Lei Zhang
Xin-Ying Ji
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