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Pathways
of apoptotic and non-apoptotic death in tumour cells
Hitoshi Okada & Tak W. Mak
Institute for Breast Cancer Research/Ontario
Cancer Institute, 620 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5G 2C1.
tmak@uhnres.utoronto.ca
Defects in cell-death pathways are
hallmarks of cancer.
Although resistance to apoptosis is closely linked to tumorigenesis, tumour
cells can still be induced to die by non-apoptotic mechanisms, such as necrosis,
senescence, autophagy and mitotic catastrophe.
The molecular pathways that underlie these non-apoptotic responses remain
unclear.
Several apoptotic and non-apoptotic pathways of cell death have been defined in
normal physiology and during tumorigenesis, and these could potentially be
manipulated to develop new cancer therapies.
The mitotic-checkpoint molecule survivin — the inactivation of which induces
the death of p53-deficient cells by mitotic catastrophe — is of particular
interest.
© 2004 Nature Publishing Group
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