Kinase inhibitors can produce off-target effects and activate linked pathways by retroactivity

Michelle L Wynn, Alejandra C Ventura, Jacques A Sepulchre, Héctor J García, Sofia D Merajver

It has been shown in experimental and theoretical work that covalently modified signaling cascades naturally exhibit bidirectional signal propagation via a phenomenon known as retroactivity. An important consequence of retroactivity, which arises due to enzyme sequestration in covalently modified signaling cascades, is that a downstream perturbation can produce a response in a component upstream of the perturbation without the need for explicit feedback connections. Retroactivity may, therefore, play an important role in the cellular response to a targeted therapy. Kinase inhibitors are a class of targeted therapies designed to interfere with a specific kinase molecule in a dysregulated signaling pathway. While extremely promising as anti-cancer agents, kinase inhibitors may produce undesirable off-target effects by non-specific interactions or pathway cross-talk. We hypothesize that targeted therapies such as kinase inhibitors can produce off-target effects as a consequence of retroactivity alone.