Main description:

Cancer is fundamentally a disease of abnormal cell proliferation: Cancer cells multiply when and where they should not. This proliferation entails escape from normal bounds imposed by the tissue environment, the internal biology of the cell (DNA damage, chromosomal imbalances, disorganized mitotic spindles), and the proliferative history of the cell (normal generational times). Some of the key oncogenic events in cancer directly perturb proteins that regulate progression through the cell division cycle, others alter cell cycle progression indirectly, through effects on signaling pathway that impinge on the cell cycle. This biology is fundamentally important in cancer therapy. Many of the workhorse treatments for cancer rely on killing proliferating cells. Furthermore, there is growing recognition that stem cell-transit amplifying cell hierarchies may persist or be generated during tumorigenesis, generating important functional heterogeneity in cell cycle control among tumor cells, with far-reaching scientific and clinical implications. This volume outlines major cell cycle perturbations that drive tumorigenesis and considers the prospects for using such knowledge in cancer therapy.

Contents:

Starting the cell division cycle

Elena Sotillo and Xavier Grana

Escape from cellular quiescence

Jun-Yuan Ji and Nicholas J. Dyson

Interplay between Cyclin-dependent Kinases and E2F-dependent Transcription.

A. Kathleen McClendon, Jeffry L. Dean, and Erik S. Knudsen
Regulation of pre-RC assembly: A complex symphony orchestrated by CDKs

Proliferation under duress

Haomin Huang and Timothy J Yen

Mitotic checkpoint and chromosome instability in cancer

Jeremy P.H. Chow and Randy Y.C. Poon

Mitotic catastrophe

Robert D. Hontz and Maureen E. Murphy

p53, ARF and the control of autophagy

Long-term proliferation

Andrea Viale and Pier Giuseppe Pelicci

Regulation of self-renewing divisions in normal and leukaemia stem cells

Eros Lazzerini Denchi

Maintenance of Telomeres in Cancer

Peter D. Adams

The senescence secretome and its impact on tumor suppression and cancer

Applications in preventing and treating cancer

Pierre Lao-Sirieix and Rebecca C Fitzgerald

Cell cycle deregulation in pre-neoplasia: case study of Barrett's esophagus

Neil Johnson and Geoffrey I. Shapiro

Targeting cyclin dependent kinases for cancer therapy