Modern biochemistry in research of human malignant cells and experimental oncology

Abstract

Modern biochemistry or biochemistry of 21th century is developing in many traditional fields: investigations of proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates, metabolites and metabolic processes, etc, however it has gained new features that based on success of Human Genome Project and on application of high performance technologies (post-genomic technologies). As a result, at the turn of the 21st century some new scientific disciplines, named “OMICS” (proteomics, transcriptomics, lipidomics, glycomics, metabolomics, etc) were created through advances in the biochemistry. Currently “OMICS” and post-genomic technologies are involved in mainstream of cancer research, including studies of human malignant cells. Since malignant tumors consist of heterogeneous cancer cells, the cultured cell lines have some advantages over biopsy simples for studies aimed at understanding the molecular basis of carcinogenesis. The malignant human cell lines differ considerably in their origin from tissues or organs, and therefore they vary widely in the differentiation characteristics and the gene expression patterns. Thus, the use of malignant cell lines ex vivo (as models of human cancers) is an important trend in search for key molecules of carcinogenesis in experimental oncology