Preface

Cancer has been a major challenge for health researchers, health care providers, and managers. The increasing incidence of cancer, both in the developed and the developing world, is attributed to longer life spans, life style changes, and environmental factors. Many of the blockbuster anti-cancer drugs of the past are slowly becoming ineffective or undesirable due to acquired resistance of cancer cells, and associated chronic toxicity. This situation demands vigorous efforts in the field of drug development for treatment and prevention. Although mortality due to cancer remains very high, spectacular advances have been made in the discovery of new anti-cancer drugs in recent years. This has been largely due to an enhanced understanding of this group of diseases at a molecular level in the post-genomic period. Not only have new approaches towards the cancer treatment been debated and agreed upon, but new targets and novel classes of anti-cancer compounds have also been discovered.

Volume 1 of this book series entitled "Frontiers in Anti-Cancer Drug Discovery", is a compilation of thirty well written reviews contributed by leading researchers in this field from all across the world. The chapters contain in this volume are the updated version of articles published in Recent Patents on Anti-Cancer Drug Discovery. These reviews can be broadly classified into four categories:

This volume reflects the complexities involved in tackling this disease and current efforts to control it. It is hoped that this volume and subsequent volumes of this series of books will benefit the scientific community, both in academia and in industry, by fulfilling their needs of comprehensive reviews on recent developments covering different important aspects of cancer drug discovery and development.

We wish to extend our warmest thanks to the staff members of Bentham Science Publishers, including Mr. Mahmood Alam (Managing Director), Ms. Samina Khan (Senior Manager), Ms. Taqdees Malik (Assistant Manager) and Ms. Sadaf Idrees Khan (Composer). They all have made key contributions to the publication of this volume.