“…In fact, certain epithelial cell lines do not follow the p53-dependent dichotomous reaction to DNA damage described in the present work and by other authors in colon carcinomas (Bunz et al, 1998;te Poele and Joel, 1999;Andreassen et al, 2001a;Magrini et al, 2002) and glioblastomas (Wang et al, 2004). For example, an HT-29A4 clone with a dominantly expressed p53 wt described by Abal et al (2004) shows a sustained cell cycle arrest and apoptosis after CPT-11 treatment, and the colon carcinoma cell line KM12 (p53 mut ) arrests transiently in the G2 phase and then proliferates normally (Goldwasser et al, 1996), while irradiated HeLa cells (p53-deficient) perform a lasting G2/M phase arrest, not apoptosis (Crawford and Piwnica-Worms, 2001). The observed dichotomy is not observed in the case of other therapeutics: for example, oxaliplatin induces apoptosis in HCT116 while HCT116p53 À/À cells are resistant (Boyer et al, 2004).…”