Compartmentalized cancer drug discovery targeting mitochondrial Hsp90 chaperones

There is a plethora of attractive drug targets in cancer, but their therapeutic exploitation proved more difficult than expected, and only rarely truly successful. One possibility not often considered in drug discovery is that cancer signaling pathways are not randomly arranged in cells, but orchestrated in specialized subcellular compartments. The identification of heat shock protein-90 (Hsp90) chaperones in mitochondria of tumors, but not most normal tissues, provides an example of a compartmentalized network of cell survival, opening fresh prospects for novel, subcellularly targeted cancer drug discovery. Oncogene (2009) 28, 3681-3688; doi: 10.1038/onc.2009.227; published online 3 August 2009