E-Book Overview
This book not only surveys the whole arena of novel anticancer drug targets, but also presents a wide-ranging selection of cutting-edge techniques currently being applied throughout novel antitumor drug discovery and development. The methods are applied to experiments involving such topics as immunotherapy, angiogenesis, cancer metastasis, the cell cycle, signal transduction inhibitors, apoptosis, antibodies, antisense molecules, microarray gene expression, flow cytometry, and PET imaging for cancer target validation. There are also proven methods for the preclinical identification of drug targets and for target validation during the clinical trials of novel agents.
E-Book Content
M E T H O D S I N M O L E C U L A R M E D I C I N E TM
Novel Anticancer Drug Protocols Edited by
John K. Buolamwini, PhD Alex A. Adjei, MD, PhD
Novel Anticancer Targets
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1 Overview of Novel Anticancer Drug Targets John K. Buolamwini and Haregewein Assefa
1. Introduction There has been an explosion in the number of potential molecular targets that can be explored for selective cancer treatment. The stage is now set to translate years of productive cancer research into more patient-friendly anticancer therapeutics. At present, the challenge is how to identify bonafide and viable targets and efficiently exploit these for the development of selective nontoxic cancer therapies, to overcome the major drawbacks of conventional cytotoxic cancer chemotherapy. To this end, it is gratifying that the selective inhibition of some of these novel targets, especially those in mitogenic signal transduction pathways like HER-2 and bcr-abl tyrosine kinases, has resulted in successful treatments of cancer patients. HER-2 is targeted by the antibody traszumamab (Herceptin®), approved for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer (1), while bcr-abl tyrosine kinase