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Outlook

Cancer touches all of our lives: we donate our money to help fight it; we care for our friends and family members who have been afflicted by it; we may ourselves be threatened by it. Thirty-three years after Richard Nixon launched the war on cancer, this disorder, in all its multitudinous forms, still accounts for more deaths each year in the United States than any cause except heart disease. It is a diagnosis that inevitably strikes fear.

Yet these are hopeful times for cancer research. Scientists once had only a rudimentary understanding of the genetic and cellular mechanisms that allow cancer to gain a foothold. The revolution in molecular biology has changed that. Today, researchers doing basic science--exploring the inner workings of our cells and our DNA--are finally uncovering the complexities of cancer. This new, detailed understanding is giving rise to new, improved strategies for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

At Southern Illinois University's Carbondale campus, we do not treat cancer patients. The clinical departments of our School of Medicine are located at the Springfield campus, which is building a new Cancer Institute for patient treatment and research. But a number of cancer-related basic science projects at Carbondale promise advances from designer drug therapy and delivery to improved diagnostic tests. This issue's special cover story describes a sampling of this research.

Bringing those applications to fruition will eventually require collaboration with clinical medicine researchers. The projects highlighted in these pages will leave another legacy, though: what they uncover about normal and abnormal cellular processes will aid the work of cancer scientists elsewhere. We are proud of our researchers' contribution and commitment to basic science that holds promise to provide new tools in the fight against this dreaded disease.