A broad-spectrum integrative design for cancer prevention and therapy: The challenge ahead

Despite exciting advances in targeted therapies, high drug costs, marginal therapeutic benefits and notable toxicities are concerning aspects of today's cancer treatments. This special issue of Seminars in Cancer Biology proposes a broad-spectrum, integrative therapeutic model to complement targeted therapies. Based on extensive reviews of the cancer hallmarks, this model selects multiple high-priority targets for each hallmark, to be approached with combinations of low-toxicity, low-cost therapeutics, including phytochemicals, adapted to the well-known complexity and heterogeneity of malignancy. A global consortium of researchers has been assembled to advance this concept, which is especially relevant in an era of rapidly expanding capacity for genomic tumor analyses, alongside alarming growth in cancer morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income nations.