Anemia Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Anemia, including details on symptoms, diagnosis, diet, treatment, causes.

DNA repair pathways in clinical practice: lessons from pediatric cancer susceptibility syndromes.

Kennedy RD, D'Andrea AD

Department of Radiation Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.

Human cancers exhibit genomic instability and an increased mutation rate due to underlying defects in DNA repair. Cancer cells are often defective in one of six major DNA repair pathways, namely: mismatch repair, base excision repair, nucleotide excision repair, homologous recombination, nonhomologous endjoining and translesion synthesis. The specific DNA repair pathway affected is predictive of the kinds of mutations, the tumor drug sensitivity, and the treatment outcome. The study of rare inherited DNA repair disorders, such as Fanconi anemia, has yielded new insights to drug sensitivity and treatment of sporadic cancers, such as breast or ovarian epithelial tumors, in the general population. The Fanconi anemia pathway is an example of how DNA repair pathways can be deregulated in cancer cells and how biomarkers of the integrity of these pathways could be useful as a guide to cancer management and may be used in the development of novel therapeutic agents.

Published 9 August 2006 in J Clin Oncol, 24(23): 3799-808.
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