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Navigating cancer network attractors for tumor-specific therapy

Nature Biotechnology volume 30, pages 842–848 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Cells employ highly dynamic signaling networks to drive biological decision processes. Perturbations to these signaling networks may attract cells to new malignant signaling and phenotypic states, termed cancer network attractors, that result in cancer development. As different cancer cells reach these malignant states by accumulating different molecular alterations, uncovering these mechanisms represents a grand challenge in cancer biology. Addressing this challenge will require new systems-based strategies that capture the intrinsic properties of cancer signaling networks and provide deeper understanding of the processes by which genetic lesions perturb these networks and lead to disease phenotypes. Network biology will help circumvent fundamental obstacles in cancer treatment, such as drug resistance and metastasis, empowering personalized and tumor-specific cancer therapies.

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Figure 1: Properties of cancer signaling networks.
Figure 2: Challenges in cancer network biology.
Figure 3: Network-attacking cancer mutations.
Figure 4: Traditional versus network biology approaches.
Figure 5: Personalized cancer network biology.

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Acknowledgements

We apologize to our colleagues whose work could not be cited due to space limitations. We thank all members of the C-SIG (DTU), the ErlerLab (BRIC), M. Yaffe (MIT) and N. Brunner (KU) for critical input on this manuscript. R.L. is a Lundbeck Foundation Fellow and is supported by a Sapere Aude Starting Grant from The Danish Council for Independent Research and a Career Development Award from Human Frontier Science Program. J.T.E. is supported by a Hallas Møller Stipend from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Visit http://www.networkbio.org/, http://www.lindinglab.org/ and http://www.erlerlab.org/ for more information on cancer-related network biology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems Biology, Cellular Signal Integration Group (C-SIG), Center for Biological Sequence Analysis (CBS), Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Lyngby, Denmark

    Pau Creixell, Erwin M Schoof & Rune Linding

  2. Biotech Research & Innovation Centre (BRIC), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Janine T Erler

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  1. Pau Creixell
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  2. Erwin M Schoof
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  3. Janine T Erler
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Correspondence to Janine T Erler or Rune Linding.

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Creixell, P., Schoof, E., Erler, J. et al. Navigating cancer network attractors for tumor-specific therapy. Nat Biotechnol 30, 842–848 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2345

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