It is soon to be a new year and hopefully you will return to work with renewed vigour after the holiday season. At this time much is printed in the popular press about how your personal year might pan out depending on your date of birth, but what will the new year bring for cancer research? Although, happily, we have no crystal ball for telling the future, we are going to highlight some of the more prominent areas of cancer research this year, and are kicking off 2008 with a new series of specially commissioned articles on hypoxia and metabolism.
Although neither area is new to cancer research, our increasing knowledge of how hypoxia and metabolism interact is providing us with a greater insight into how tumours can respond to changes in the availability of oxygen. On page 51, Chi Dang and colleagues discuss the possible links between the oncogenic protein MYC and hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF1) and HIF2. In normal hypoxic cells it seems that HIF1 can mitigate the transcriptional activity of MYC. However, all this changes in MYC-overexpressing tumour cells, with MYC and HIF1 becoming partners in crime that alter the metabolic status of the cells.
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