Differentiation therapy is a method to treating advanced cancers in which malignant cells are encouraged to differentiate into more mature forms using pharmacological agents.
[1] The approach was motivated by noticing that leukemia cells fail to differentiate and fully mature.
[3] The first differentiation agent found to be successful was all-trans-retinoic acid (ATRA) in the treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL).
[1] The process of cancer spreading (metastasis) involves tumour cells undergoing an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) to invade and spread, followed by a mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition (MET) at remote sites.
Other agents investigated (pre-clinically) to encourage MET include cholera toxin (CTx) and forskolin (Fsk).