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Description

The Akt signaling pathway, one of the most often dysregulated signaling pathways in cancer, plays an important role in mediating a very broad range of cellular processes such as growth and development, cell cycle, energy homeostasis, and cell survival. Akt, a serine/threonine kinase that phosphorylates over 100 protein substrates, mediating cell survival and proliferation signals, is often itself hyperphosphorylated in various tumor types. Although the Akt gene itself is not known to be mutated in cancers, many of the upstream regulators of Akt, including IR, IRS, PI3K and PTEN, are oncogenes and tumor suppressors. Downstream of Akt, the mammalian Target Of Rapamycin (mTOR) complex is a key regulator of growth and metabolism. As nearly all of the players in the Akt/mTOR signaling pathway are coordinately regulated by phosphorylation, understanding the role of this pathway in normal physiological processes and in diseases such as cancer and diabetes requires the ability to simultaneously measure phosphorylation status of multiple protein targets.