Preface

The journal Current Signal Transduction Therapy will start its 6th year in 2011 and in the past five years it has become a very important forum for signaling related pathomechanisms and drug discovery issues. As we have pointed out earlier the general concept of the journal is to describe molecular pathomechanisms and signal transduction therapy with special emphasis on concepts as “targeted therapies”, “network signaling”, “molecular diagnostics”, “multiple targets” and “personalized therapy”. In the last year personalized therapy has become a very hot topic, so CSTT is dedicated to support papers in this field. The aim of personalized therapy is to match the right drug to the right patient and, in some cases, even to design the appropriate treatment for a patient according to his/her genotype. The modern concept of personalized medicine includes pharmacogenomics, pharmacogenetics, pharmacoproteomics, and metabolomics. Pharmacogenomics deals with the application of genomics to drug discovery and development and includes the mechanism of action of drugs on cells as revealed by gene expression patterns. Basic technologies of molecular diagnostics play an important role, particularly mutation/amplification analysis and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping. Molecular diagnostics is integrated with therapy for selection of the treatment as well for monitoring the results. A combination of target-driven and chemistry-driven drug discovery with biomarker identification could be the basis of personalized therapy. Most of the papers in the current issue are related to targeted therapy with possible associated molecular diagnostics in cancer including the role of TGFBeta in tumor metastasis formation, mTOR in heamatologic malignancies, TACC2 as a tumor suppressor for breast cancer working through PLCgamma pathway, CK1, CK2 and GSK3 in Normal and Malignant Haematopoiesis, Dasatinib as a dual Src/Abl kinase inhibitor in the treatment of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, molecular mechanisms of action of Gas1 and its possible therapeutic applications in cancer, and identification of phosphoproteins and their impact as biomarkers in cancer therapeutics. Two papers describe targeted therapies for other diseases like Dystroglycan, in neuromuscular diseases including muscular dystrophy, and Glycogen Synthase Kinase-3 and Proline-Rich Akt Substrate (PRAS40) in cardiac hypertrophy. One paper describes the role of Leptin signaling in platelets which may be involved in enhanced tendency to thrombosis and atherosclerosis in patients with the metabolic syndrome, and one paper describes the role of p70 S6 kinase and ERK Activity in neuronal development and death.