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rendition switcher   Question: What obstacles does the unique
genetic composition of human cancers pose to treatment, and how
can they be overcome?  Gregory Hannon: Although each cancer is
unique, there are certain core pathways, biological modules in
essence, that are altered in nearly every cancer cell.  And the
number of those modules expands as one gets more specific to a
particular subtype; let’s say estrogen receptor positive breast
cancer.  So, the notion, and this is one of the ways in which
RNAi is being deployed very powerfully, is to try to correlate
the vulnerabilities that are created by the inactivation in
those individual biological models and then exploit that
vulnerability for therapy.  The way that you can think about
this is that cells are designed or evolve to be robust.  And
every time you take away one