Take-home message: are we "off target"?
Targeted anticancer therapies interfere with specific molecules and block the growth and spread of cancer. In the last decade, the concept of targeted drugs has gained much support from the scientific and medical community as a result of positive outcomes in clinical trials with cancer patients. Particularly, the efficacy of tyrosine kinase inhibitors such as imatinib mesylate (Gleevec), gefitinib (Iressa), sorafenib (Nexavar) and sunitinib malate (Sutent) against various cancer types led to their rapid approval and broad clinical use. Nevertheless, many questions and issues concerning targeted therapies remain to be solved, and the presentations at the recent 5th International Symposium on Targeted Anticancer Therapies (TAT), held March 8-10, 2007, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, have provided insight into such topics as proper target identification and validation, rectification of criteria used for evaluation of targeted agents in preclinical and clinical setting, design of better preclinical models and advantages of phase 0 clinical trials for evaluation of targeted therapies.
Khurdayan
Valeria K
VK
Prous Science, Barcelona, Spain. journals@prous.com
D000818:Animals; D000970:Antineoplastic Agents / Q000008:administration & dosage* / Q000737:chemistry; D016503:Drug Delivery Systems / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D004353:Drug Evaluation, Preclinical; D006801:Humans; D015394:Molecular Structure; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000188:drug therapy*; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
D000970:Antineoplastic Agents