MYC and lung cancer: More recently, it has been shown that inhibition of c-MYC expression occurs via transcriptional inhibition caused by strand invasion of the c-Myc targeted oligonucleotide resulting in quadruplex stabilization.[21] Growth inhibition induced by the Pu27 oligonucleotide is preceded by very striking DNA damage.[28] Since VEGF is highly overexpressed in lung cancer and its overexpression is commonly associated with poor prognosis [40–43] we elected to study the effect of oligonucleotides encoding the genomic VEGF promoter quadruplex-forming sequence on NSCLC cells.