Figure 3.

Therapeutic targeting of survivin. Major classes of therapeutic agents targeting survivin are depicted in the figure. Such treatments include drugs that (A) function at the transcription level and inhibit the transcription of survivin (such as promoter inhibitors (a), Antisense oligonucleotides, Ribozymes, and SiRNA (a′), (B) inhibit survivin at post-translational level (such as CDK inhibitors (b) and Hsp90 inhibitors (b′)), (C) include vaccines that are based on cytotoxic activities of CD8⁺ T lymphocytes against specific survivin epitopes (c) or (D) gene therapy methods including transfecting with dominant negative mutants (d) which encode proteins that suppress survivin’s function. Within this class, we propose that use of the breakthrough technology of nuclease-based genome-editing tools (d′), may show promising results once designed and applied against survivin in pre-clinical trials.