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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Cytokines in cancer therapy

subject

description

The treatment options for patients with cancer are presently limited to surgical and radiotherapeutic strategies for localized disease and the systemic use of cytotoxic drugs for disseminated disease. So far, chemotherapy remains the mainstay for the treatment of metastatic cancer. Treatment results, however, have been stagnant particularly for the more frequent cancers such as lung cancer, breast cancer and colorectal cancer. Current research is seeking new concepts of cancer treatment, based upon a more profound understanding of tumor cell biology. The oncogenetic defect in neoplastic cells is a genetic alteration in a primordial cancer cell, which subsequently leads to clonal expansion and, its, many instances, to clonal evolution with additional genetic alterations, giving cancer cells a proliferative advantage. This oncogenetic change leads to a quantitively or qualitatively abnormal production of proteins which regulate growth and differentiation. Proteins involved in this scenario include growth factors and their receptors, cytoplasmic transmitter molecules or DNA-binding proteins that regulate gene expression. Many of these key proteins have been identified and their aberrant expression has been shown to induce cancer, thus generating the term "protooncogenes". Once the oncogenic alteration has led to neoplastic transformation, the balance of gene expression is altered. The alterations leading to the malignant transformation can be very subtle and are in most instances apparently not detected by the host immune system. Only a small percentage of human cancers have been shown to be immunogenic. This appears to be the case when the alteration of gene expression leads to cellular