Critical Reviews™ in Eukaryotic Gene Expression

ISSN for PRINT: 1045-4403

For Online Access

Best Paper Award Selection - Editorial Board Site

2001, Volume11

Issue 1-3

271 pages

Issue price - $507.00

Chia-Ling Hsieh
Departments of Urology, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA 22908

Leland W. K. Chung
Departments of Urology and Cell Biology, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA 22908

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death among North American men. The low cure rate for prostate cancer is associated with the fact that many patients have metastatic disease at the time of disease presentation. Currently available therapeutic modalities for prostate cancer, such as surgery, radiation, hormone therapy, and chemotherapy, have failed to cure patients because these therapies are not sufficiently tumor-specific, resulting in dose-limiting toxicity. Therefore, gene therapy may offer great promise in this regard. In this article, we summarize current advances in gene therapy technologies for the treatment of cancer in general, and future prospects for treatment of human prostate cancer metastasis. We specifically emphasize current studies for improvement, both in the efficiency and the specificity of viral and nonviral vectors, and restricted transgene expression in tumors, to achieve selective targeting with minimized host organ toxicity, based on the molecular understanding of potential regulatory differences between normal and tumor cells. Cell and animal models used to study prostate cancer growth, invasion, and metastasis, and their usefulness in preclinical evaluation of therapeutic vectors in the treatment of protate cancer skeletal metastasis are also discussed.

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