Resumen
The global burden of colorectal cancer is high. Chemotherapy has been the backbone of colorectal cancer therapy for decades. Toxic side effects and frequently occurring drug resistances remain challenging problems. Therefore, exploring natural compounds with low or even no toxicity holds great potential. However, natural curcumin is poorly absorbed, limiting its clinical use. Therefore, our focus was to screen different molecular types of colorectal cancer to find the ones with the highest sensitivity to curcumin. We observed very individual responses to curcumin for various colorectal cancer cell lines. Most curcumin-sensitive cell lines were of the microsatellite-stable molecular type, and expressed high baseline levels of the I?Ba protein. Contrarily, curcumin-resistant lines were mainly microsatellite instable, with low baseline I?Ba levels. Considering all of the data obtained, we conclude that patients with microsatellite-stable tumors and high baseline I?Ba protein expression would benefit from treatment with novel curcumin formulations and derivatives.