CD95L pro-drug: a novel Swiss Army Knife in cancer therapy?

Abstract

In the search for the 'magic bullet' to fight cancer, scientists have developed a plethora of more or less useful drugs and treatments. Nonetheless, the current success rate of various antitumor chemotherapeutics and biologics for the noninvasive treatment is still quite disappointing. A major problem of most noninvasive treatments of tumors is the fact that chemotherapeutics and biologics are not very tumor-specific, but cause a lot of damage to normal untransformed cells and thereby severe side effects. This is particularly true for death ligand (TNF, CD95L and TRAIL)-based biologics, which besides inducing apoptosis in tumor cells have a broad spectrum of effects on normal cells.1 An ideal anticancer drug would thus be selective and specific for tumor cells, while not causing any damage to untransformed cells.