Towards a more specific therapy: targeting nonmelanoma skin cancer cells.

Epithelial cancers of the skin, e.g. basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common tumours in humans with increasing incidence. Hence the development of new therapeutic strategies is of utmost interest. For many years the most often used conventional therapies for these diseases were surgical procedures such as curettage and electrodesiccation, excision or, with so far the best outcome in terms of remission rates, micrographic surgery. Other ablative treatment modalities are cryotherapy, radiation therapy or the use of lasers (Er:YAG, CO(2)). All those above-mentioned treatments have in common that they are quite unspecific and do not target the tumour itself or its environment, thus leading to unwanted effects in the surrounding tissue such as scar formation or other cosmetically disfiguring events. Therefore, the development of novel, more pathogenesis-based therapies such as the use of retinoids, cyclooxygenase inhibitors, topical immunomodulators, inhibitors of the sonic-hedgehog signalling pathway or photodynamic therapy are challenging new approaches.