Abstract
The relationship between cancer and DNA damage is intimate and multifaceted. Damage to DNA can cause cancer, major treatment modalities including radiation therapy and chemotherapy can cure or slow down cancer through their genotoxic effects, and germline and somatic defects in the DNA damage response (DDR) machinery may predispose to or promote tumorigenesis, respectively (1, 2). Furthermore, replication stress with the ensuing endogenous DNA damage elicited by oncogenes in nascent tumor cells leads to activation of DNA damage checkpoints and cellular senescence or cell death, thereby providing an intrinsic biological barrier against tumor progression (3–5). The PNAS article by Redon et al. (6) adds yet another dimension to the interplay between DNA damage and cancer: a surprising discovery that cancer can elicit long-range signals that evoke serious types of DNA damage in otherwise healthy tissues in various parts of the body distant to sites of the growing tumor.
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