‘Sex ’ in the cancer cell

The development of better tools for diagnosis and more accurate prognosis of cancer includes the search for biomarkers; molecules whose presence, absence or change in quantity or structure is associated with a particular tumour or prognosis/therapeutic outcome. While biomarkers need not be functionally relevant, if their expression influences cell transformation or cancer cell survival, then they could also provide new targets for therapeutic drugs. In recent years attention has been applied to a group of proteins known as cancer testis antigens (CT antigens) [1]. These proteins are products of genes whose expression was originally thought normally to be confined to the testis, yet they are expressed in tumour cells. CT genes are bound to serve a wide array of roles in the testes, whic