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Apoptosis and cancer: When BAX is TRAILing away

Nature Medicine volume 8, pages 216–218 (2002)Cite this article

The development of anticancer therapies that target apoptosis pathways may be hampered by resistance of certain tumor cells to death signals. New findings show that tumor cells lacking the pro-apoptotic protein Bax are resistant to apoptosis induced by the death ligand TRAIL, but that chemotherapeutic drugs can restore their sensitivity to TRAIL. (pages 274–281)

Cancer can be partially attributed to defects in the regulation of apoptotic cell death. Failure to trigger the cellular suicide program not only predisposes to development of malignancies, but also increases resistance of tumors to anticancer drugs and irradiation. The exponential increase in knowledge of how apoptosis is regulated at the molecular level has raised expectations that effective apoptosis-targeting therapeutics will be developed in the near future1,2.

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Figure 1: Pathways for caspase activation and apoptosis.

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  1. The Burnham Institute, San Diego, California, USA

    Wilfried Roth & John C. Reed

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  1. Wilfried Roth
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  2. John C. Reed
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Roth, W., Reed, J. Apoptosis and cancer: When BAX is TRAILing away. Nat Med 8, 216–218 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0302-216

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