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Drazen Raucher, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Mississippi Medical Center

REVIEW

It was a pleasure to read and review the book, Microcompetition with Foreign DNA and the Origin of Chronic Disease by Hanan Polansky. In this book, Dr. Polansky presents the concept of microcompetition, a new biological mechanism on the origin of chronic diseases. The book covers a wide range of important topics, such as autoimmune disease, osteoarthritis, coronary artery disease, stroke, cellular signaling, cell motility and cancer. The book is well-written and basic concepts are clearly presented. To support his theory, Dr. Polansky has included original data from the published articles and numerous examples.

The technical notes on cancer are especially interesting. In this chapter, Dr. Polansky clearly explains how a normal cell may react after acquiring any foreign DNA, such as viral DNA. He describes microcompetition, a new biological mechanism, and shows that disruption of this mechanism decreases cell differentiation and increases cell proliferation leading to cancer. That microcompetition with foreign DNA may be the prevalent cause of cancer is supported by frequent detection of viral genomes in human tumors. As one example which supports his theory, Dr. Polansky stated that the frequency observed decrease in Fas transcription in various cancer is consistent with the predicted effect of microcompetition with foreign DNA on Fas transcription and cancer. Other examples include progressive decrease in BRCA1 transcription, detection of protein free, the carcinogenic effect of epigenic carcinogens and replication defective viral genomes in many tumors. Therefore, microcompetition with foreign DNA may explain in a unique way, many otherwise unexplained observations reported in cancer literature.

In summary, Dr. Polansky's book illustrates how microcompetition with foreign DNA may cause a variety of chronic diseases, and it will contribute to our deeper understanding of the origin and molecular mechanisms of chronic diseases.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Drazen Raucher received a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics in 1988 from the University of Osijeck, Osijeck, Croatia. In 1995, he received a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from the Institute of Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University. From 1995-99, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Cell Biology at Duke University in the Department of Cell Biology. Dr. Raucher was then awarded an Assistant Research Professor position in the Department of Cell Biology and eventually taught in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke from 2000-01. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi, a position he has held since 2002. Dr. Raucher has published 13 peer-reviewed papers.

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