Figure 2.

Anticancer therapeutic strategies attacking early-stage and late-stage cancer cells. (a) Early-stage cancer cells simply enable recovery of the disrupted redox status using antioxidants/antioxidative process accelerators. Briefly, chemotherapy with radiation or oxidative stress inducers is used to remove these cancer cells, in which significant DNA damage occurs. (b) Late-stage cancer cells have higher basal ROS levels and antioxidative activities than normal or early-stage cancer cells. In this case, cancer cells can be killed by redox homeostasis disruption following severe cytotoxic effects mediated by direct ROS inducers and/or antioxidant inhibitors. Prooxidative agents hold promise for potent cancer chemotherapy. The double-lined arrows and double-lined squares indicate the direction of anticancer molecules for movement and in cancer cells, respectively.