Abstract

Amongst all currently used drugs in the field of cancer therapy, the most prominent group of agents which induce DNA, damage both directly or indirectly. Intuitively DNA should not be a perfect target for relatively unspecific small molecular weight drugs. However, the current understanding is that not damage per se but cellular response to DNA damage induced by antitumor agents is responsible for their specific targeted effect towards cancer cells in comparison to the normal cells. DNA damaging chemotherapeutics include compounds with diferent activities namely: directly or indirectly induce DNA strand breaks, covalently modify DNA bases, change the chromatin structure and topology by inhibiting chromatin-modifying enzymes. In this special issue of Current Medicinal Chemistry entitled....