Collateral Lethality in Pancreatic Cancer.

The chromosome 18q21 deletion in nearly one third of pancreatic adenocarcinomas eliminates not only the tumor suppressor SMAD4 , but also neighboring genes with important cellular roles, such as ME2 This is tolerated by cancer cells only because ME2 has a functionally redundant paralog, ME3 , elsewhere in the genome. A study shows that these cells are vulnerable to ME3 silencing; this concept of collateral lethality could provide a new therapeutic strategy for a difficult-to-treat disease.
(©2017 American Association for Cancer Research.)