| Lung cancer is one of the most common malignancies in the world, and non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) represents approximately 80% of all lung cancers,its incidence and mortality are increasing rapidly year after year.Surgical resection is the only curative treatment for patients with NSCLC. For patients with nonresectable NSCLC, conventional chemotherapy or radiotherapy improves prognosis,but only a little. Therefore, the development of novel strategies for the treatment of NSCLC continues to be necessary.Advances in our understanding of the molecular biology of tumor cells have led to the development of new treatment strategies, including gene therapy. The molecular basis of cancer is now known to involve activation of dominant oncogenes and inactivation of tumour suppressor genes, these genetic events may represent novel targets for cancer therapy.Tumor suppressor genes constrain unusual cell proliferation. These genes induce apoptosis and/or cell cycle arrest in malignant cells .There is a growing list of possible tumor suppressors that can potentially be used to control cancer cell growth in the clinic,such as p53, Rb, p21, p16, p27 and so on.Among these genes, p16 and IL-24 are two representative members whose expressions are always lost during tumor progression, and the latter is already inâ…¡phase clinical trials.More and more subsequent gene transfer studies using plasmid-based or adenoviral vector mediated delivery of IL-24 and p16 confirmed that their protein expression can reduced growth and colony formation in a variety of human cancer models, including breast, lung, colon, prostate carcinomas and so on, but not normal cells. IL-24 can selectively suppressed tumor cell growth via G2/M cell cycle blockade and apoptosis induction;whereas,p16 can suppress cancer by G1/S arrest.Therefore, successful introductin of them into cancerous cells will have therapeutic outcomes.All these are making them promising and popular targets in gene therapy for cancer.
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