Michael Lübbert • Peter A. Jones
Editors

2014

Preclinical Models
and Treatment Approaches

The view that cancer is primarily a genetic disease has been dramatically challenged by the recent discoveries demonstrating that malignancies are marked by multiple epigenetic abnormalities; the resultant gene silencing may be more ubiquitous than gene inactivation by genetic events. This paradigm change was accompanied by enormous advances in high-throughput sequencing of primary human tumors, leading to the discovery of “driver” mutations in a plethora of genes encoding chromatin- modifying enzymes. Finally, the last few years also saw a striking expansion in the clinical development of drugs inhibiting several of these enzymes.