oa Editorial: DNA Damage as a Strategy for Anticancer Chemotherapy

Amongst all currently used drugs in the field of cancer therapy, the most prominent group of agents which induce DNA, damage both directly or indirectly. Intuitively DNA should not be a perfect target for relatively unspecific small molecular weight drugs. However, the current understanding is that not damage per se but cellular response to DNA damage induced by antitumor agents is responsible for their specific targeted effect towards cancer cells in comparison to the normal cells. DNA damaging chemotherapeutics include compounds with diferent activities namely: directly or indirectly induce DNA strand breaks, covalently modify DNA bases, change the chromatin structure and topology by inhibiting chromatin-modifying enzymes. In this special issue of Current Medicinal Chemistry entitled “DNA Damage as a Strategy for Anticancer Chemotherapy”, Blasiak [1], D'Arcy, N and Gabrielli [2], Stojanovska et al. [3], McQuade et al. [4], Muller [5], Basourakos et al. [6] and Mordente et al. [7] comprehensively reviewed the most recent literatures concerning the various strategies for cancer chemotherapy specifically using DNA damage drugs. The articles present in this special edition cover a wide range of topics that include both clinical practice and translational research. The authors of the presented papers will critically discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the current therapies and the factors that explain decreasing eradication rates. We believe that a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the DNA damage response could help in the rational designing of new DNA damaging agents. Such agents can lead to the successful discovery of drugs or innovative combination strategies with improved activity, selectivity toward tumor cells. We hope that the readers find this issue useful and as well as can implement these strategies in their daily course of work.