The potential for gene-targeted radiation therapy of cancers

Targeted cancer therapy is the mantra now chanted by oncologists of all types. Everyone hopes that the rapid expansion in the knowledge of cancer cell genetics, signaling, regulatory factors and other changes that underlie malignant transformation and metastasis will lead to innovative approaches for the treatment of cancers. To date, successful targeted therapies have been derived from pharmaceutical chemistry - designing chemical compounds intended to disrupt a crucial pathway for malignant cells to survive, grow and metastasize. Radiotherapy also has a goal of more-selective targeting of therapeutic radiation effects to only tumor cells. In this review, we describe our efforts to create a form of gene-targeted radiation therapy by using the unique radiation effects of radionuclides that decay by the Auger process attached to oligonucleotide carrier-molecules that are capable of forming triplex DNA structures with target sequences in the genome of the human cancer cell.