Targeted
cancer therapy is the mantra now chanted by oncologists of all types. Everyone hopes that the rapid expansion in the knowledge of
cancer cell genetics, signaling, regulatory factors and other changes that underlie malignant transformation and
metastasis will lead to innovative approaches for the treatment of
cancers. To date, successful targeted
therapies have been derived from pharmaceutical chemistry - designing chemical compounds intended to disrupt a crucial pathway for malignant cells to survive, grow and metastasize.
Radiotherapy also has a goal of more-selective targeting of therapeutic radiation effects to only
tumor cells. In this review, we describe our efforts to create a form of gene-
targeted radiation therapy by using the unique radiation effects of
radionuclides that decay by the Auger process attached to
oligonucleotide carrier-molecules that are capable of forming
triplex DNA structures with target sequences in the genome of the human
cancer cell.