Mitosis poisons p53

Abstract

In the current issue of Cell Cycle Sonia Lain and her collaborators provide convincing evidence of the importance of a p53 cell based assay to identify new antitumoral compounds. The reported findings represent a further development of those recently published by the same group.1 Since its discovery in 1979 p53 has been studied intensively as a single protein and more recently as the primary member of a family of transcription factors whose main activities, such as growth arrest, apoptosis, senescence and differentiation, are closely related to tumor suppression. Within the considerable amount of published literature regarding p53 there is information on almost every one of the 393 amino acids composing p53 wild-type full length protein. Undoubtedly such advanced knowledge has the possibility of its rapid transfer to potential clinical applications thereby making p53 as a protein capable of successfully filling the gap, which still exists, from the bench to the bed of a given cancer patient.2,3 The findin...