Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 9, Issue 25, 2003

Conventional cancer therapy is administered in the form of surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy. Immunotherapy is the latest asset to the panel of anti-cancer treatments. This approach appears favorable over the other more conventional methods for various reasons: (1) it is highly specific for cancer cells and, therefore, low toxicity should be expected; (2) it recognizes and eliminates cancer cells regardless of their phase in Read More

The biological effects of radiation affect both neoplastic and normal tissues. The nature and extent of such effects, however, depend on selected biological parameters (e.g., oxygen supply, cell cycle) and can be modified by chemical agents such as radiosensitizers, radioprotectors and chemotherapeutic agents. A precise control of the mode of action of the radiation is important in order to achieve the maximum effect Read More

The nonapeptide bradykinin is an important growth factor for many cancers. Certain peptide and non-peptide bradykinin antagonists show remarkable anti-cancer activities in both in vitro and in vivo cancer models, especially of lung and prostate cancers. Bradykinin antagonists stimulate apoptosis in cancers by a novel “biased agonist” mechanism: they block intracellular increase of calcium concentration but sti Read More

The inherited or acquired deregulation of protein kinase activity has been implicated in the pathogenesis of many human diseases, including cancer. Therefore, the inhibition of kinases has been proposed to be a promising strategy in the context of anti-cancer treatment. Many other kinases have been selected as drug discovery targets based on the prevalence of mutations, over-expression and unscheduled activatio Read More

Metastatic melanoma patients have a dismal prognosis with poor responsiveness to chemotherapy, radiation therapy and current immunotherapy regimens and a median survival of less than six months. Novel therapies directed at melanoma-selective molecular targets are urgently needed. Based on the frequent constitutive activation of the mitogenactivated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathway in malignant melanomas Read More

Vitamin A and its biologically active derivatives are involved in a complex arrangements of physiological and developmental responses in many tissue of higher vertebrates. Retinoids are natural and synthetic compounds related to retinoic acid that act through interaction with two basic types of nuclear receptors: retinoic acid receptors (RAR α, RARβ and RARγ) and retinoid X receptors (RXRα, RXRβ and RXRγ) as retinoid-i Read More

25 years after the first approval of cisplatin in the clinic against a number of cancer diseases, cisplatin and related compounds continue to be among the most efficient anticancer drugs used so far. Efforts are focused to develop novel platinum- and non-platinum-based antitumor drugs to improve clinical effectiveness, to reduce general toxicity and to broaden the spectrum of activity. In the field of non-platinum compound Read More