oa Editorial [ Special Board Members Issue (Edior-in-Chief: Michelle Prudhomme)]

Apart from review articles, research articles are now also published in Anti-Cancer Agents in Medicinal Chemistry (ACA-MC). This special Editorial Board Issue gathers articles written by ACA-MC Editorial Board Members on the latest developments in various topics and contains both research and review articles. In the first paper, V. Murray and N. Kandasamy report their studies on the sequence specificity of the anti-tumour drug, cisplatin, in telomeric DNA sequences compared with consecutive guanine DNA sequences.The authors concluded that cisplatin preferentially damaged the ten consecutive guanine sequence although the telomeric DNA sequences were also a major site of cisplatin adduct formation. During the past two decades, a great interest has been devoted to histone deacetylases (HDACs), a family of metalloproteases which play a key role in the development of cancer. Small molecule histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACIs) have been synthesized and form a newly emerging class of anti-cancer agents. In this issue, two articles deal with histone deacetylase inhibitors. The first one by Zeng Wenbin et al., entitled «Molecular probing and imaging of histone deacetylase inhibitors in cancer treatment» reports the recent progresses of molecular imaging for assessing HDACIs. The second one, by Wenfang Xu et al., is focused on each member of HDACs and selective HDAC inhibitors, the relationship between structure and selectivity is examined. Several solid tumor types progress with metastases to bone. Bone provides a unique microenvironment for tumor growth with niches occupied by hematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells. Circulating tumor cells can compete with the normal stem cell occupants of these niches. So, the stem cell niche can be considered as a pharmaceutical target for prevention of skeletal metastases. This is detailed in the review proposed by John M. Chirgwin....