Intratumour hypoxia has long been considered a driving force of tumour progression and a negative prognostic factor in human cancers. The discovery of hypoxia inducible factors (HIFs), which mediate transcriptional responses to changes in oxygen levels, has renewed enthusiasm for the discovery and development of targeted therapies exploiting the hypoxic tumour microenvironment. In spite of an ever increasing number of putative small molecule inhibitors of HIF, only few progress through pre-clinical and early clinical development. In this review, we will focus primarily on: (1) HIF inhibitors that have been more recently described and (2) small molecules targeting HIF that are being tested in early clinical trials or that are already approved for use in patients. A rigorous ‘validation’ of HIF targeted therapies in relevant pre-clinical models and eventually in pharmacodynamic-based early clinical trials is essential for ‘credentialing’ HIF-1 as a legitimate target that can be pharmacologically modulated in cancer patients.

Ligand-activated Eph tyrosine kinases regulate cellular repulsion, morphology, adhesion, and motility. EphA2 kinase is frequently up-regulated in several different types of cancers, including prostate, breast, colon, and lung carcinomas, as well as in melanoma. The existing data do not clarify whether EphA2 receptor phosphorylation or its simple overexpression, which likely leads to Eph kinase-independent responses, plays a role in the progression of malignant prostate cancer. In this study, we address the role of EphA2 tyrosine phosphorylation in prostate carcinoma cell adhesion, motility, invasion, and formation of metastases. Tumor cells expressing kinase-deficient EphA2 mutants, as well as an EphA2 variant lacking the cytoplasmic domain, are defective in ephrinA1-mediated cell rounding, retraction fiber formation, de-adhesion from the extracellular matrix, RhoA and Rac1 GTPase regulation, three-dimensional matrix invasion, and in vivo metastasis, suggesting a key role for EphA2 kinase activity. Nevertheless, EphA2 regulation of cell motility and invasion, as well as the formation of bone and visceral tumor colonies, reveals a component of both EphA2 kinase-dependent and -independent features. These results uncover a differential requirement for EphA2 kinase activity in the regulation of prostate carcinoma metastasis outcome, suggesting that although the kinase activity of EphA2 is required for the regulation of cell adhesion and cytoskeletal rearrangement, some distinct kinase-dependent and -independent pathways likely cooperate to drive cancer cell migration, invasion, and metastasis outcome.

IL-11 and its receptor, IL-11Ra, are expressed in human cancers; however, the functional role of IL-11 in tumor progression is not known. We found that IL11 is a hypoxia-inducible, VHL-regulated gene in human cancer cells and that expression of IL11 mRNA was dependent, at least in part, on HIF-1. A cooperative interaction between HIF-1 and AP-1 mediated transcriptional activation of the IL11 promoter. Additionally, we found that human cancer cells expressed a functional IL-11Ra subunit, which triggered signal transduction either by exogenous recombinant human IL-11 or by autocrine production of IL-11 in cells cultured under hypoxic conditions. Silencing of IL11 dramatically abrogated the ability of hypoxia to increase anchorage-independent growth and significantly reduced tumor growth in xenograft models. Notably, these results were phenocopied by partial knockdown of STAT1 in a human prostate cancer cell line (PC3), suggesting that this pathway may play an important role in mediating the effects of IL-11 under hypoxic conditions. In conclusion, these results identify IL11 as an oxygen-and VHL-regulated gene and provide evidence of a pathway "hijacked" by hypoxic cancer cells that may contribute to tumor progression.