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©The Author(s) 2025. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Targetable pathways for drug repurposing in gastric cancer
Alba Valero-Almingol, Sheyla Montori, Nayra Felípez, Enrique Santamaría, Joaquín Fernandez-Irigoyen, Irina Luzko, Anabella A Cuestas, Carlos Pardo, Ricard Prat, Leticia Moreira, Eduardo Albéniz
Alba Valero-Almingol, Sheyla Montori, Nayra Felípez, Gastroenterology Research Unit, Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Navarra, Navarrabiomed, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Hospital Universitario de Navarra, Pamplona 31008, Navarre, Spain
Enrique Santamaría, Joaquín Fernandez-Irigoyen, Clinical Neuroproteomics Unit, Proteomics Platform, Navarrabiomed, Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Navarra, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Hospital Universitario de Navarra, Pamplona 31008, Navarre, Spain
Irina Luzko, Anabella A Cuestas, Carlos Pardo, Ricard Prat, Leticia Moreira, Department of Gastroenterology, Hospital Clínic Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas August Pi i Sunyer, Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Hepáticas y Digestivas, Departament de Medicina, Facultat de Medicina i Ciències de la Salut, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona 08036, Catalonia, Spain
Eduardo Albéniz, Department of Gastroenterology, Hospital Universitario de Navarra, Navarrabiomed, Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Navarra, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Pamplona 31008, Navarre, Spain
Co-corresponding authors: Leticia Moreira and Eduardo Albéniz.
Author contributions: Valero-Almingol A, Montori S, Moreira L and Albéniz E conceptualized the study, reviewed and edited the manuscript; Valero-Almingol A performed the literature review and drafted the manuscript; Felípez N, Santamaría E, Fernández-Irigoyen J, Luzko I, Cuestas AA, Pardo C and Prat R made critical revisions; All the authors read and approved the final manuscript; Moreira L and Albéniz E contributed equally to the manuscript as co-corresponding authors by supervising and reviewing the work.
Supported by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, No. PI24/00784, No. PI24/00737, No. PI21/01181, No. PI21/00333 and No. INT22/00112; and Departamento de Universidad, Innovación y Transformación Digital Gobierno de Navarra, No. 0011-1408-2024-000011 and No. 0011-1408-2022-000010.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Albéniz E reports a consultant agreement with Creo Medical and AGS Medtech and a grant from ISCIII- INT 22/00112 during this study. The other authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Open Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See:
https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Corresponding author: Eduardo Albéniz, MD, Senior Researcher, Department of Gastroen
terology, Hospital Universitario de Navarra, Navarrabiomed, Instituto de Investigación Sani
taria de Navarra, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Calle Irunlarrea, 3, Pamplona 31008, Na
varre, Spain.
eduardo.albeniz.arbizu@navarra.es
Received: June 20, 2025
Revised: July 31, 2025
Accepted: September 19, 2025
Published online: October 21, 2025
Processing time: 123 Days and 19.9 Hours
Gastric cancer (GC) is both the fifth most common cancer worldwide and the fifth in mortality. Owing to a lack of symptoms in the early stages and unspecific clinical presentation in the later stages, GC is usually diagnosed at advanced stages. This means that only approximately 60% of patients are eligible for curative treatment, and overall, GC patients have a 5-year survival rate of only 28.3%, underscoring the importance of developing new treatment strategies. Drug repurposing involves identifying new therapeutic uses for approved drugs and is a promising strategy for cancer treatment because of its lower cost and faster development time. A variety of targetable pathways are involved in GC progression, including the mitogen-activated protein kinase, phosphoinositide 3-kinase/protein kinase B/mammalian target of rapamycin, p53, Janus kinase 2/signal transducer and activator of transcription 3, hypoxia-inducible factor-1α, wingless-type mouse mammary tumor virus integration site family/beta-catenin (Wnt/β-catenin), nuclear factor kappa B, and Hippo pathways. Therefore, the repurposing of drugs targeting these pathways represents an interesting option in the search for new treatments for GC. In this review, we explore some relevant pathways involved in the development of GC and the possibilities of repurposing drugs that target them.
Core Tip: Gastric cancer patients have a dismal prognosis when it is detected in advanced stages, so the search for new treatments is imperative to improve survival rates. In this review, we explored the potential of repurposed drugs for targeting pathways related to the development and progression of gastric cancer, as their lower costs and faster development make them promising candidates in the search for new therapies to treat this disease.
