Focus

Environmental chemical agents and carcinogenesis

The role of low doses of chemicals or chemical mixtures in carcinogenesis is still an open research field. On June 23rd of this year, the Journal Carcinogenesis published a special issue on this topic entitled "Assessing the Carcinogenic Potential of Low Dose Exposures to Chemical Mixtures in the Environment" (http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/Suppl_1?etoc), result of the work of 174 researchers working on cancer research in several and prominent institutions all over the world. The scientists, among which the IGM - CNR researchers Chiara Mondello and A. Ivana Scovassi, were assembled by the NGO "Getting to Know Cancer" (http://www.gettingtoknowcancer.org), founded in 2011 by Leroy Lowe (Nova Scotia, Canada) and Michael Gilbertson (Ontario, Canada), to tackle the relationship between environment and cancer.
The Carcinogenesis special issue contains a capstone and 11 reviews, co-authored by Chiara Mondello and A. Ivana Scovassi. The scientists, organized in 12 teams, selected 85 chemical agents diffused in the environment and reviewed their effect of various cellular pathways known to be implicated in carcinogenesis. The researchers found that 50 of those chemicals, alone, or in mixtures, can play a pro-carcinogenic action even at the low doses present in the environment. Since about 20% of cancers seem to be due to chemical exposures in the environment that are not related to personal lifestyle choices, the work clearly indicates that it will be very important to potentiate the research on the effects of chemical mixtures to get information relevant to fight cancer.