Raf kinase signaling has been thoroughly investigated over the last 20 years. A-Raf, B-Raf and C-Raf, the 3 mammalian members of the Raf family, are involved in a variety of cellular processes such as growth, proliferation, survival, differentiation and transformation. The detection of B-RAF mutations in a wide variety of human cancers, the description of wildtype and mutant B-RAF as tumor antigens in melanoma and the promising outcome of clinical trials evaluating the Raf inhibitor Nexavar 1 (Sorafenib, BAY 43-9006) have sparked a broad interest in the scientific community. After a short historical detour and an introduction into Raf kinase signaling, we are going to discuss here recent outcomes of Raf kinase research with respect to tumor formation and give an overview on current efforts to develop anticancer therapies interfering with aberrant Raf kinase signaling. ' 2006 Wiley-Liss, Inc.Key words: cancer; clinical trials; transformation; drug delivery; signal transduction; mitogenic cascade; Raf kinases
Raf kinases: The historyIn 1983, the cloning of the acutely transforming replication-defective mouse type C virus 3611-MSV and characterization of its acquired oncogene was reported. 1 Since 3611-MSV induces rapidly growing f ibrosarcoma in mice, the transduced oncogene was called v-raf, whereas its cellular homologue was named c-raf. 1 Shortly thereafter, Bister and coworkers described the cloning of the avian acute leukemia retrovirus Mil Hill No. 2 (MH2). 2 MH2 was found to carry a second potential oncogene in addition to vmyc, which was termed v-mil, whereas its cellular counterpart was called c-mil. 3 Already a hybridization analysis and the gross comparison of restriction maps of v-raf and v-mil pointed at sequence homologies between these 2 genes. 4 By direct sequencing of both genes it was finally proven that 3611-MSV and MH2 have integrated orthologues of the same gene into their genomes. 5 In the following we are going to use the nomenclature for Raf kinases as proposed in a recent review from Wellbrock et al. 6 In contrast to all other oncogene kinases known at that time, no tyrosine kinase activity was detected in C-Raf. 7 Indeed, it was found that C-Raf is a serine/threonine kinase. 8,9 This and the observation that Raf coexists with the Myc oncogene in retroviruses 10 led to two novel concepts: (i) There is a tyrosine to serine phosphorylation switch as the growth factor signal enters the cell, and (ii) the mechanistic basis for cooperation between nuclear and cytoplasmic oncogenes as well as for signal transduction from cell surface receptors to the nucleus is the phosphorylation of transcription factor class oncogenes such as Myc. 11-13 Growth factor abrogation and oncogene cooperation studies were performed to corroborate this signaling scheme. 14-17 Additional important early findings were (i) the cooperation between Raf and Myc in growth factor independent proliferation, immortalization and tumor induction, 14,18,19 leading to the Raf-Myc balance model, 20 and (ii) the cell lineage-switch ...