Damage and Repair in Translational Oncology: Overview

wnloade nown to early investigators, DNA damage and repair has been a major focus of anticancer therapy he beginning of clinical oncology. From the early days of using x-irradiation, to the development of en mustard analogs, to today's more sophisticated approaches, DNA damage and repair has strongacted our ability to successfully treat human malignancy. This area of basic, translational, and clinience is very broad. The traditional focus of DNA damage and repair has been on diseases such as erma pigmentosum, and attempting to understand the basic molecular mechanisms of DNA repair ses. It is only recently that we have begun to appreciate how we might modulate these processes to ve our ability to advance cancer care. No fewer than 10 separate DNA repair processes are operative her organisms, and the total number of separable processes could be substantially higher. Some of ost useful clinical agents depend on causing DNA damage that is repaired by nucleotide excision . X-irradiation induces damage that is mostly repaired by base excision repair and double-strand repair break repair. We are now learning how to modulate select DNA repair pathways to benefit patients with breast cancer and other malignancies. Clin Cancer Res; 16(18); 4511–6. ©2010 AACR.