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Drug therapy

Exploiting synthetic lethality to improve cancer therapy

The success of cancer therapies is hampered by a paucity of suitable drug targets and the rapid development of therapy resistance. The concept of synthetic lethality provides a potential solution to these constraints via the identification of novel therapeutic vulnerabilities, as exemplified in two recent studies.

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Figure 1: Types of synthetic lethality.

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Correspondence to Diede Brunen.

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Brunen, D., Bernards, R. Exploiting synthetic lethality to improve cancer therapy. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 14, 331–332 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2017.46

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