Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Failure to induce tumour selective, efficient cell killing is a major problem underlying the limitations of conventional cytotoxic chemotherapy. Greater understanding of the downstream death inducing signalling pathways and how they are regulated in the drug resistant setting is crucial for improvement of survival in most solid cancers. Here we review the role played by BH3 only proteins in mediating cell death through BAX and BAK, and how this knowledge has lead to a new generation of targeted agents with promising cancer cell killing efficacy.