Targeting alternatively spliced sequence features for cancer diagnosis and therapeutics

Alternative splicing is emerging as a major new mechanism of functional regulation in mammals, and there is increasing evidence that human cancers often involve significant changes in alternative splicing. In some cases, these changes contribute functionally to the maintenance of the transformed state and could be useful as novel targets for anticancer therapy. In other cases, they reflect changes due to tumorigenesis and could be useful for diagnostic purposes. Fundamentally, alternative splicing offers a novel opportunity to target individual subregions of a gene product that are preferentially expressed in tumors and which are not found in isoforms of the same gene found preferentially in normal tissues.