In cancer, aberrations in crucial cellular pathways result in abnormal cell proliferation, tumor growth and, often, metastasis. The resilience of cancer cells to stress signals subjected by their environment -- e.g., restrictive messages sent from the surrounding tissue, lack of nutrients and oxygen, altered biophysical environment due to cellular crowding, or cytotoxic insults from cancer treatment -- lies at the heart of this pathological condition at the cellular level.
Increased understanding of how cancer cells respond to and evade lethal stress signals is required for us to understand how cancer and treatment resistance form. Improved knowledge in this crucial area will help design better and more targeted treatments to tackle this common and devastating disease.
This Article Collection focuses on different aspects of stress in cancer biology with emphasis on the molecular and cellular mechanisms. The collection welcomes both original articles and reviews.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to: cancer- and stress-related studies on cytotoxic drugs, radiation responses, DNA damage, chromatin regulation, nuclear organization, nucleoli and other nuclear organelles, transcriptomics, RNA regulation, splicing, non-coding RNA, RNA binding proteins, proteomics, protein traffic, intra- and intercellular signalling, p53 pathway, hypoxia, ER stress, ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS), autophagy, and biomechanics upon different stress signals.
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Dr. Leena Latonen, Ph.D., is a cancer biologist leading the Cancer Stress Biology research group at Institute of Biomedicine, University of Eastern Finland. The group studies molecular, cellular, and tissue mechanisms that contribute formation and progression of cancer. Her research interests include multiple aspects of cancer-related cellular stress responses, including tumor suppressor p53, DNA damage and radiation responses, and the nucleoli as a stress-responsive organelle. Currently, her group has a special focus on how non-coding RNA and RNA binding proteins may contribute to cancer drug resistance.
