APOPTOSIS AS A GOAL OF CANCER THERAPY

Apoptosis is the regulated form of cell death utilized by metazoans to remove unneeded, damaged or potentially deleterious cells. In the immune system, apoptosis is important for eliminating unwanted and potentially dangerous lymphocytes at many stages of maturation and after activation of mature cells (Chen et al., 2007).v(effector caspases), so the proteolytic cascade doesn’t occur as well as apoptosis (Reed & Pellecchia , 2005).Cancer is a complex disease that is manifested through the survival advantage inherent to tumor cells. Apoptosis can be subverted during tumorigenesis through the systematic decay of regulatory control mechanisms. This ultimately results in the generation of a malignant phenotype and resistance to chemotherapy and radiation therapy (Mulherkar et al., 2007).Most of the compounds currently used as anticancer agents are believed to target tumor cell elimination via induction of apoptosis. Thus, we need to further elucidate the molecular control of the effectors of apoptosis as well as strengthen our knowledge of the anti-apoptotic events that promote tumorigenesis (Ghobrial et al., 2005).The aim of this work is to study the role of apoptotic and antiapoptotic events in the process of tumorigenesis, and to discuss the new strategies of apoptosis-targeted therapies for cancer.