I would like to point out that the manuscripts presented in this Oncogene issue dealing with genetic biochemical and practical therapeutic aspects of breast cancer do not cover all of the basic areas or defining principles of the field. Indeed, many areas are not represented at all. We wish to apologize for this deficit in advance and to recognize the many important laboratories that could have been contributors to areas we did not cover. However some of the topics we have ignored have been covered in recent review journal issues and it is our hope that other deficits will be remedied with general review areas to be covered in the future.
Several broad areas are covered in this group of brief reviews. The issues of heritable and sporadic breast cancer genes are discussed in the context of the BRCA1 and 2 genes (Scully et al., Zheng et al., Wang et al.) and the erbB receptor superfamily respectively (Harari and Yarden, Brennan et al., Hutchison and Muller). In addition we have tried to provide an intellectual framework to consider features of tumors that relate to their growth in vivo (Saaristo et al.) and therapeutic approaches based on specific targeting of transforming gene products (Weiner and Adams, Yu and Hung and Roh et al.).
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