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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Caspases, or cysteine-aspartic proteases, are a family of cysteine proteases, which play essential roles in apoptosis (programmed cell death), necrosis and inflammation. Caspases are essential in cells for apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in development and most other stages of adult life, and have been termed „executioner“ proteins for their roles in the cell. Some caspases are also required in the immune system for the maturation of cytokines. Failure of apoptosis is one of the main contributions to tumour development and autoimmune diseases; this coupled with the unwanted apoptosis that occurs with ischemia or Alzheimer’s disease, has stimulated interest in caspases as potential therapeutic targets since they were discovered in the mid 1990s.
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