About: Anticancer gene

Anticancer genes are genes that, when ectopically overexpressed, specifically destroy tumour cells without harming normal, untransformed cells. This cellular destruction can be due to a variety of mechanisms, such as apoptosis, mitotic catastrophe followed by apoptosis or necrosis, and autophagy. Anticancer genes emerged from studies on cancer cells in the late 1990s. Currently, there have been 291 anticancer genes discovered in the human genome. In order to be classified as an anticancer gene, the gene must have base substitutions leading to missense amino-acid changes, deletions, or insertions leading to frameshifts that alter the protein the gene codes for, increases and decreases in copy-number increases, or gene rearrangements leading to their deregulation.