Regulation of TEAD Transcription Factors in Cancer Biology

Transcriptional enhanced associate domain (TEAD) transcription factors play important roles during development, cell proliferation, regeneration, and tissue homeostasis. TEAD integrates with and coordinates various signal transduction pathways including Hippo, Wnt, transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ), and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) pathways. TEAD deregulation affects well-established cancer genes such as KRAS, BRAF, LKB1, NF2, and MYC, and its transcriptional output plays an important role in tumor progression, metastasis, cancer metabolism, immunity, and drug resistance. To date, TEADs have been recognized to be key transcription factors of the Hippo pathway. Therefore, most studies are focused on the Hippo kinases and YAP/TAZ, whereas the Hippo-dependent and Hippo-independent regulators and regulations governing TEAD only emerged recently. Deregulation of the TEAD transcriptional output plays important roles in tumor progression and serves as a prognostic biomarker due to high correlation with clinicopathological parameters in human malignancies. In addition, discovering the molecular mechanisms of TEAD, such as post-translational modifications and nucleocytoplasmic shuttling, represents an important means of modulating TEAD transcriptional activity. Collectively, this review highlights the role of TEAD in multistep-tumorigenesis by interacting with upstream oncogenic signaling pathways and controlling downstream target genes, which provides unprecedented insight and rationale into developing TEAD-targeted anticancer therapeutics.