Abstract

As the signalling pathways that control cellular proliferation and death are unravelled, a range of targets have emerged as candidates for molecular cancer therapy. For their survival, cancer cells depend on a few highly activated signalling pathways; inhibition of these pathways has a strong apoptotic effect and can lead to tumour regression. But drugs that exploit this weakness, such as imatinib, have not cured patients: withdrawal of the drug leads to disease recurrence, and sustained treatment leads to the emergence of drug-resistant clones. Can cancer be cured, or will it have to be controlled as a chronic disease?

Author affiliations

1. Shoshana Klein and Alexander Levitzki are at the Unit of Cellular Signalling, Department of Biological Chemistry, The Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.
2. Frank McCormick is at the Cancer Research Institute, University of California San Francisco, 2340 Sutter Street, San Francisco, California 94115, USA.

Correspondence to: Frank McCormick² Email: mccormick@cc.ucsf.edu

Correspondence to: Alexander Levitzki¹ Email: Levitzki@vms.huji.ac.il

Published online 20 June 2005

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