Figure 2.

Potential approaches to use cancer-associated splice variants clinically for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes. For diagnostic applications, the splice variant transcript or protein can serve as target that is detected by PCR or with an antibody, respectively. For cancer therapy, splice variants with a function promoting tumor development may be down-regulated by inhibition of splice variant synthesis at the level of the splicing process or by RNA interference at the mature mRNA level. Furthermore, tumoral splice variant proteins may serve as targets for radiotherapy or immunotherapy.