Invited review Recent developments in the field of antitumour anthracyclines

The anthracycline antibiotics daunorubicin (1) and dox-orubicin (2) have been introduced in clinical use for more than 30 years for the treatment of a wide variety of can-cers such as acute myeloid leukaemia, and, in the case of doxorubicin, a diversity of solid tumours [1]. Used as sin-gle agents or in combination therapy, they are the compo-nents of adjuvant, curative, as well as palliative treatments. Despite their extensive clinical utilisation, their mecha-nism of action has been the subject of controversy. A crit-ical evaluation of these has recently been proposed [2] according to which these multiple mechanisms may be in fact related to the utilisation of drug concentration under varied experimental conditions. Nevertheless, two data seem to be formerly established: the first is that at dru