These findings suggest that the TGF-β signaling pathway is involved in the antitumor mechanisms of 5-FU alone or IFN-α/5-FU, and that TGFBR2 overexpression facilitates its autocrine stimulation.
We examined the protein levels of proapoptotic BAX and antiapoptotic BCL-2 and BCL-xL, which are targets of the TGF-β signaling pathway during apoptosis induction [22] - [24].