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Research Highlights

Nature Reviews Cancer 9, 768–769 (1 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/nrc2751

Therapeutic resistance: Smoothing the way

Sarah Seton-Rogers

There is a compelling rationale for using hedgehog pathway inhibitors to treat both medulloblastoma and basal cell carcinoma. Phase I clinical trial data in basal cell carcinoma and a case study of a patient with medulloblastoma reported recently in the New England Journal of Medicine have shown that GDC-0449, which inhibits hedgehog signalling by binding to the smoothened (SMO) receptor, exhibits anti-tumour activity.