Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 14, Issue 28, 2008

Despite significant improvement in treatment efficacy, cancer is still a major cause of morbidity and mortality. The treatment of cancer patients is variable and it is more and more dependent on specific tumor characteristics, such as the expression of distinct receptors, enzymes and transcription factors. Usually these tumor characteristics are determined by biopsy of the primary tumor at diagnosis. In metastatic dise Read More

Tumour resistance to anticancer agents remains a challenge in oncological practice, because it results in exposure to toxicities, unnecessary costs and, most importantly, delay of a potentially more effective treatment. Drug uptake by tumours may be impaired by several resistance pathways. Reasons for primary resistance may be that the drug is not delivered to the tumour or that its uptake by the tumour is not sufficient. Dru Read More

Non-invasive detection of tumor hypoxia using radiolabeled 2-nitroimidazoles has been a major effort during the last two decades. Recent years have witnessed the introduction of several new compounds which are chemically related to [18F]fluoromisonidazole (FMISO) but show slight but distinct differences in biodistribution and metabolic clearance. Although [18F]FMISO has shown clinical potential it suffers from suboptim Read More

The integrin family plays important roles during tumor angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels from pre-existing vasculature. Traditional structural and functional imaging techniques are not sufficient for early lesion detection, patient stratification, or monitoring the therapeutic efficacy against cancer. Molecular imaging, the visualization, characterization and measurement of biological processes at the molecula Read More

The early assessment of a solid tumor's response to conventional or new drug therapy to complement or replace current RECIST (or other clinical) criteria remains an elusive goal. The work horse PET tracer 18F-FDG, may represent the most immediate method to track individual tumor response to therapy for many types of cancer. Newer radiotracers such as radiolabeled annexin V, have also shown the ability to selecti Read More

Protein tyrosine kinases (PTKs) play a pivotal role in signal transduction pathways and in the development and maintenance of various cancers. They are involved in multiple processes such as transcription, cell cycle progression, proliferation, angiogenesis and inhibition of apoptosis. Among the PTKs, the EGFR is one of the most widely studied and has emerged as a promising key target for the treatment of cancer. Indeed, se Read More

Human epidermal growth factor receptor type 2 (HER2) is a transmembrane tyrosine kinase receptor, which is overexpressed in a large fraction of breast, ovarian, urinary bladder and a number of other carcinomas. Overexpression of HER2 is associated with poor prognosis. Treatment of patients with HER2-expressing breast cancer with a humanized anti-HER2 monoclonal antibody trastuzumab has resulted in improved su Read More

The vast majority of breast and prostate cancers express specific receptors for steroid hormones, which play a pivotal role in tumor progression. Because of the efficacy of endocrine therapy combined with its relatively mild sideeffects, this intervention has nowadays become the treatment of choice for patients with advanced breast and prostate cancer, provided that their tumors express hormone receptors. However, in case Read More

Prostate cancer is one of the most common causes of cancer in men. Evaluating the different stages of prostate cancer with conventional imaging techniques still proves difficult. Nuclear imaging might provide a technique that is able to evaluate prostate cancer, but clinical application has been limited due to lack of accuracy of current radiopharmaceuticals. The development of radiopharmaceuticals that can be targeted to spec Read More

Cancer remains an important and growing health problem. Researchers have made great progress in defining genetic and molecular alterations that contribute to cancer formation and progression. Molecular imaging can identify appropriate patients for targeted cancer therapy and may detect early biochemical changes in tumors during therapy, some of which may have important prognostic implications. Progress in this Read More