Introduction - Synthetic lethality: targeting damaged pathways
Thomas Helleday
Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology and Biology, University of Oxford, UK
Synthetic lethality is the concept where the combination of two otherwise non-lethal mutations results in a non-viable cell. Cancers distinguish themselves from normal cells by having mutations in tumour suppressor genes and activated oncogenes, which often results in an increased genetic instability further fuelling carcinogenesis. Additional signalling and DNA repair pathways become essential in the mutated background of the cancer. A large effort is currently being devoted to identifying synthetic lethal interactions in order to determine cancer targets that selectively kill cancer cells and is covered in this topic.
