The cell-autonomous mechanisms underlying the activity of metformin as an anticancer drug

Pleiotropic: Producing or having multiple effects from a single gene.
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British Journal of Cancer - open access

.....The resulting picture is revealing and complex at the same time and partly explains why metformin has such pleiotropic effects depending on context (Figure 2). These studies have opened the path to a systems understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying metformin effects, but at the same time call for more such studies in different systems and in different conditions. Only such a genome-wide understanding of the subtle differences in the response of different systems in different conditions will eventually offer a rational basis for designing new strategies to potentiate the action of metformin by combining it with different antitumour treatments.

  Figure 1.
Word clouds of metformin-related terms. We first extracted all PubMed publications having ‘cancer’ and ‘metformin’ in their titles or abstracts. We next used a text mining approach to count the occurrences of gene mentions in these abstracts (A). Genes were identified by searching gene names and their synonyms, as annotated in UniProtKB. We kept only relevant terms according to a P-value calculated using as a background set of randomly selected publications. The same analysis was done for (B) processes, (C) diseases and (D) cells and tissues using MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms from the NLM (National Library of Medicine)-controlled vocabulary thesaurus. The size of each word is proportional to the frequency of their occurrence in the selected abstracts.
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