Gastric cancer (GC) ranks fifth in global incidence and fourth in mortality. The current treatments for GC include surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Although treatment strategies for GC have been improved over the last decade, the overall five-year survival rate remains less than 30%. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find novel therapeutic or preventive strategies to increase GC patient survival rates. In the current study, we found that tegaserod maleate, an FDA-approved drug, inhibited the proliferation of gastric cancer cells, bound to MEK1/2 and suppressed MEK1/2 kinase activity. Moreover, tegaserod maleate inhibited the progress of gastric cancer by depending on MEK1/2. Notably, we found that tegaserod maleate suppressed tumor growth in the patient-derived gastric xenograft (PDX) model. We further compared the effect between tegaserod maleate and trametinib, which is a clinical MEK1/2 inhibitor, and confirmed that tegaserod maleate has the same effect as trametinib in inhibiting the growth of GC. Our findings suggest that tegaserod maleate inhibited GC proliferation by targeting MEK1/2.
Keywords: MEK1; MEK2; chemoprevention; gastric cancer; tegaserod maleate.