www.oncotarget.com Oncotarget, 2019, Vol. 10, (No. 50), pp: 5168-5180 Research Paper Detection of tyrosine kinase inhibitors-induced COX-2 expression in bladder cancer by fluorocoxib A Jennifer Bourn1,2,4, Sony Pandey1, Jashim Uddin3, Lawrence Marnett3 and Maria Cekanova1,2 1Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA 2University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Graduate School of Genome Science and Technology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA 3A. B. Hancock, Jr., Memorial Laboratory for Cancer Research, Departments of Biochemistry, Chemistry and Pharmacology, Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology, Center for Molecular Toxicology and Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN 37232, USA 4Current address: Department of Cancer Biology, College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Correspondence to: Maria Cekanova, email:
[email protected] Keywords: bladder cancer; TKIs; RTKIs; COX-2; targeted therapies Received: June 18, 2019 Accepted: July 17, 2019 Published: August 27, 2019 Copyright: Bourn et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ABSTRACT Among challenges of targeted therapies is the activation of alternative pro- survival signaling pathways in cancer cells, resulting in an acquired drug resistance. Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) is overexpressed in bladder cancer cells, making it an attractive molecular target for the detection and treatment of cancer. Fluorocoxib A is an optical imaging agent that selectively targets COX-2.