Efflux Pumps, Biofilms, and Tumor Resistance: Converging Mechanisms in Microbial and Cancer Survival: A Narrative Review
Efflux Pumps in Microbial and Cancer Resistance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29409/y71hpz97Keywords:
Antimicrobial resistance, Biofilm, Cancer chemoresistance, Efflux Pumps, TumourAbstract
Drug resistance is one of the greatest obstacles to pharmaceutical success in contemporary medicine and has greatly restricted both antimicrobial and therapeutic approaches to cancer. While microbial multidrug resistance and cancer chemoresistance have been traditionally considered discrete processes, there is growing evidence that they have a number of common survival mechanisms. This narrative analysis critiques and clarifies drug-resistant bacterial pathogens and cancer cell molecular, structural, and physiological processes, including efflux pumps, biofilm-associated protection, and tumour microenvironment-mediated resistance. A comprehensive search of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar for papers on multidrug resistance mechanisms in microbial and cancer systems. This review shows how bacterial resistance-nodulation-division (RND) and cancer-associated ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters reduce intracellular drug accumulation and favour treatment failure. Biofilms and solid tumours have remarkable parallels in their extracellular polymeric matrices, which hinder medication penetration and let resistant cell populations survive. Emerging efflux pump inhibitors, antimicrobial peptides, drug delivery systems based on nanocarriers coupled to microenvironmental surveillance and microenvironment targeting technologies are considered among promising mechanisms for combating multidrug resistance. With much advancement, clinical translation continues to be constrained by toxicity, low selectivity, and resistance network complexity. In general, we emphasize that microbial and cancer resistance have in common the adaptive strategies and underscore the critical need for multi-domain strategies to develop optimized therapies against multidrug resistance.
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Data Availability Statement
No new data were generated or analyzed in this study. All information presented in this review is derived from previously published studies, which are appropriately cited within the article.
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