We describe a light-cone wave-function formalism for hadroproduction of heavy flavors via gluon-gluon fusion. The approach is well suited to address coherence effects in heavy-quark production on nuclei at small x~~ o.~ A-"~. Nuclear attenuation in hadroproduction of heavy-flavors is found to be similar to shadowing effects for heavy-flavor structure functions in deep inelastic scattering from nuclei. Nevertheless, the remaining differences in the theoretical formulation of both processes imply corrections to the factorization theorems. O 1995 American Institute of Physics.