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Editor's Corner

Cover Caption

The news that Senator Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor has focused intense attention on this deadly disease. Sadly, each year in the United States, roughly 9000 people are diagnosed with aggressive gliomas, roughly 50% of whom will not survive more than a year. These tumors confound surgeons by burrowing into the surrounding normal brain tissue making it very difficult to extract the entire tumor without impairing patient function. More often than not, these tumors quickly return. Therapies that can target the tumor with a minimal effect on surrounding brain tissue are desperately needed. The mouse on the cover of this month's Cancer Biology and Therapy was injected with a Glioblastoma cell line and treated with an adenovirus carrying MDA7/IL-24, a cytokine able to kill tumor cells without harming normal cells. The mice were then received radiation therapy. This mouse is tumor-free at 18 months after treatment. To learn more about treating Glioblastomas with a combination of MDA7/IL-24 and radiation therapy, see the article by Yacoub and colleagues. Mice have long been a favorite model system for cancer biologists. But if new cancer drugs are to be discovered using high throughput screens, more tractable genetic systems need to be employed. In this issue of Cancer Biology & Therapy, Siddiqui and colleagues demonstrate that the humble nematode, C. elegans, can be used to study cancer related mutations and carcinogens. The 5-year survival rates for lung cancers are roughly 15%. Siddiqui and colleagues have identified several mutations in the C-met oncogene that are specific to lung cancer patients. Overexpressing these mutants in the worms, the authors find that the mutants have vulval phenotypes that can be easily screened. The worm on this month's cover expresses one of these lung cancer mutants, c-Met R988C, fused to GFP, which results in a protruding vulva phenotype (seen as the bulge on the left side of the worm). To learn more about the effects of the lung cancer mutations on C. elegans phenotypes as well as the effect of nicotine on worms expressing these mutants see the article by Siddiqui and colleagues.