Can't kick that oncogene habit.
One of the most exciting developments in recent cancer treatment has been the move away from crude cytotoxic agents toward drugs that inhibit specific targets in specific cellular pathways. One assumption of this strategy is that maintenance of human cancers is dependent upon a limited cadre of therapeutically tractable oncogenic lesions. In this issue of Cancer Cell, an intriguing paper from Sharma et al. endorses this approach by showing that evolution appears to be working for us. They show that an innate asymmetry in the dynamics of intracellular signaling biases pathway inhibition in favor of cell death. This bias may significantly potentiate targeted cancer therapies.
Evan
Gerard I
GI
Cancer Research Institute and Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California San Francisco Comprehensive Cancer Center, 2340 Sutter Street, San Francisco, California 94143, USA. gevan@cc.ucsf.edu
D017209:Apoptosis; D006801:Humans; D009154:Mutation; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000235:genetics* / Q000378:metabolism* / Q000503:physiopathology; D009857:Oncogenes; D015398:Signal Transduction / Q000502:physiology*