Cancer: so common and so difficult to deal with

While great advances have been made in some areas of cancer therapies, there remain serious shortcomings in our ability to effectively treat most patients. Many of the current and most exciting approaches in this area come from the concept of personalized medicines, where individual aspects of a patient’s disease are considered in the design and implementation of a specific therapeutic strategy. For these approaches to be optimally effective, we must continue to improve our understanding of not only the general biological barriers that generically challenge our ability to deliver drugs to cancers but also parameters related to genetic and epigenetic variables associated with a specific patient and their unique cancer. This chapter will examine some of the issues related to mechanisms that both drive the proliferation of cancer cells and reduce their susceptibility to the induction of cell death. These two issues uncontrolled growth and the acquisition of immortality are the basic tenets of why cancers are currently one of the most serious health concerns worldwide and the focus of topics discussed herein that relate to why cancers are so difficult to deal with.