Synthetic Lethality as a Promising Approach for Targeted Cancer Prevention

Carcinogenesis is recognized as a multistep process. It occurs over a relative long span of time, which offers intervention opportunities for cancer prevention [ 1 ] . Using drugs to prevent cancer rather than treat cancer is the major research goal in the field of ‘chemoprevention’. Tremendous research efforts have been devoted toward using natural, synthetic or biological agents to prevent, suppress or delay the initiation and or the progression of premalignant cells to cancer [ 1 ] . However a big challenge for effective cancer prevention is to identify chemoprevention agents with demonstrable efficacy and safety for healthy general population [ 2 ] .