Identifying new targets for cancer therapy: the dawn of personalized cancer treatment?

摘要

The concept of personalized cancer treatment has developed rapidly towards an achievable goal in the last 10 years, driven partly by the identification of multiple new 'druggable' intra-cellular targets, and partly by the expanding use of techniques such as gene-expression profiling to uncover genes and gene products central to the pathogenesis of individual tumors. This issue of Therapy includes articles and reviews providing an insight into the current 'state-of-the-art' for targeted therapy in several diseases.Probably the first truly targeted therapy to have a major clinical impact has been ritux-imab, directed at the CD20 antigen in B-cell lymphomas. This and other monoclonal antibody-based therapies with activity in lym-phoma are described in a thorough review by Drs Khubchandani and Czuczman [l], which also describes multiple intracellular targets, including spleen tyrosine kinase (syk) histone deacetylases and the PI3/Akt/mTOR pathway.