Current Cancer Drug Targets - Volume 9, Issue 7, 2009

We hope that you will find the reviews in this special issue of Current Cancer Drug Targets informative and stimulating so that together we can contribute to found new strategies for treatment of cancer and its effects. Cancer metastasis is a complex cascade of events that includes detachment of metastatic cells from the primary tumour and invasion of the surrounding interstitial stroma, entry of the metastatic cells Read More

Therapy with aminobisphosphonate (N-BPs), and zoledronic acid (ZOL) especially, has become a standard of care for patients with malignant bone disease. In addition, preclinical and preliminary clinical data suggest that N-BPs exert their direct or indirect anti-tumour effects on cancer growth factor release, cancer cell adhesion, invasion and viability, cancer angiogenesis and cancer cell apoptosis. Here, we will discuss the mole Read More

Integrins constitute a family of cell surface receptors that are heterodimers composed of noncovalently associated α and β subunits. Integrins bind to extracellular matrix proteins and immunogobulin superfamily molecules. They exert a stringent control on cell migration, survival and proliferation. However, their expression and functions are often deregulated in cancer, and many lines of evidence implicate them as ke Read More

Bisphosphonates are extensively used to treat cancer-induced bone disease in a range of solid tumours and multiple myeloma, where they reduce the incidence of skeletal related events and improve patients' quality of life. Recent reports indicate that bisphosphonates may also prevent recurrence of breast cancer at peripheral sites, suggesting that these drugs may have anti-tumour effects outside the skeleton. Anti-tu Read More

Bisphosphonates are the standard of care for preventing skeletal morbidity and treating hypercalcemia of malignancy in patients with bone metastases. Zoledronic acid (intravenous; 4 mg monthly) is approved to prevent skeletalrelated events (SREs) in patients with bone metastases from several tumor types, and can improve survival in some subsets of patients with skeletal metastases and high baseline bone turnov Read More

This system constituted of the Receptor Activator of nuclear Factor-kB Ligand (RANKL), the Receptor Activator of Nuclear Factor-kB (RANK) and by the decoy Receptor Osteoprotegerin (OPG) plays a central role in bone resorption. Denosumab (AMG 162) is an investigational fully human monoclonal antibody with a high affinity and specificity for RANKL.This review will critically describe and discuss the recent results of clini Read More

The treatment of sarcoma urgently requires new, innovative therapeutic strategies. The most recent improvements in the cure of patients with localized disease have been achieved by dose-intensification, in turn paying the price of acute severe toxicity and secondary malignancies. Keeping side-effects to a minimum is an important goal for pediatric patients and this may be achieved by combining standard cytotoxic chemot Read More

Bone disease (BD) is the hall-mark clinical feature of multiple myeloma (MM), accounting up to 60% of patients with bone pain at diagnosis and 60% with a pathologic fracture during the course of their disease. Experimental models, which recapitulate in vivo the human bone marrow microenvironment (HBMM) in immunodeficient mice have been recently developed as valuable tool for the study of MM pathophysiology Read More

Appropriate subcellular localization of proteins is crucial for regulating their functions. Both p53 and the BH3- only Bid play roles in the development and the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). They both participate in the cross talk of cell cycle arrest and apoptosis in response to DNA damage. However, some important issues related to their pathways are not yet resolved. Bid genomic loci contain p53-binding DNA res Read More

Prostate cancer possesses its unique feature of low proliferation rate and slow growth. Ca2+-induced apoptosis is not dependent on cell cycle progression and targeting this pathway could circumvent the problems encountered using current cytotoxic chemotherapies for prostate cancer. Hypoxia-inducible factor 1α (HIF-1α) is another novel cancer drug target and inhibitors of hypoxia-response pathway are being develope Read More