Current Cancer Drug Targets - Volume 18, Issue 5, 2018

Treatment for advanced non-small cell lung cancer has changed in the last two decades, with many new drugs, mostly target agents, included in the algorithm, improvement of progression free survival and overall survival, but also higher costs for health systems or health insurances. Herein, we analyze the clinical effectiveness of target therapies for non-small cell lung cancer, according to their clinically meaningful outcome Read More

The effectiveness of new personalized treatment procedures in oncology is based on the fact that certain tumors exhibit specific molecular features. More in detail, neoplastic tissues of patients should display a specific biomarker, most often a specific genetic alteration and/or under/overexpression of a definite protein, that could be the target of its respective drug. Immunohistochemical and molecular analyses Read More

Today, we are experiencing a real cultural revolution in the therapeutic approach to cancer of the colon - rectum, that by orphan disease, it is now becoming an important paradigm of scientific innovations and concepts. Survival of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (m-CRC) has been significantly improved with the introduction of the monoclonal antibodies that have as target the vascular endothelial growth factor (VE Read More

Gastrointestinal (GI) tumors are among the leading cause of death in cancer patients worldwide. Particularly, gastric cancer (GC) is the third cause of cancer deaths, whereas esophageal neoplasm is the eighth leading most common cancer worldwide and its incidence, especially adenocarcinoma type, is continuously increasing. Also, Hepatocellular carcinoma, Cholangiocarcinoma and pancreatic cancer represent Read More

Melanoma represents 2-3% of all cancers, 95% of them arise from skin, while only 5% are non-cutaneous melanoma. Despite an optimal surgery management, the risk of a local and systemic relapse remains high, particularly in high-risk patients (node-positive or node-negative T3b, T4 a/b). We conducted a systematic review of the main published and ongoing phase I/II/III trials between 2000 and June 2015 on the adjuvant tr Read More

Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy in males and, despite a marked improvement in diagnostic techniques, a not small percentage of prostate tumours is still diagnosed in advanced stage. It is now clear that prostate cancer passes through distinct phases during its natural history, starting from an initial phase, in which the disease has a locoregional extent, until a very late phase when it becomes refractory to horm Read More

In the last decades, the treatment of mRCC, metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma, has become more and more complex due to the approval of a great number of effective systemic treatments that have significantly improved the prognosis of patients suffering from such disease. An additional knowledge of the genetic aberrations and the molecular pathways alterations that underlie RCC, has promoted the development of seve Read More

Over the last 15 years, we have seen a huge expansion of the development of drugs directed against biomolecular targets within breast cancer cells. The over-expression of certain receptors (ER, PgR, HER-2, VEGF-R), as well as alteration of several intracellular signal transduction pathways (the PI3K-AKT-mTOR pathway, MEK-MAPK pathway, loss of PTEN, etc ...) has a great impact on the likelihood of recurrence and progressi Read More

Background: Drugs for targeted therapies are primarily Small Molecules Inhibitors (SMIs), monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), interfering RNA molecules and microRNA. The use of these new agents generates a multifaceted step in the pharmacokinetics (PK) of these drugs. Individual PK variability is often large, and unpredictability observed in the response to the pharmacogenetic profile of the patient (e.g. cytochome P450 enzyme), Read More