%0 Journal Article
%T Targeted therapy for lung cancer: present and future
%A Charu Aggarwal
%J SCIE-indexed Journal
%D 2014
%X Over the last decade, the oncology field has witnessed significant advances in our understanding of biology of oncologic diseases. Instead of treating a particular histology, or organ system, it is now clear that a cancer with a specific histology represents a constellation of diseases with distinct molecular profiles and sensitivities to treatment. This has largely been boosted by the availability of genomic and transcriptomic profiling, and accessibility of high-throughput and cost-effective readouts of hundreds of individual mutations affecting dozens of cancer genes. Personalized therapy based on patient¡¯s individual biologic and molecular profile is a promising approach to optimize efficacy with the available agents. This understanding has allowed us to deliver targeted therapy, which utilizes agents that affect a known aberrant pathway or molecular target in the cancer cell or tumor microenvironment. Well-documented examples of targeted therapy include the use of trastuzumab to treat HER2-amplified breast cancer (1) and imatinib for BCR-ABL translocated chronic myelogenous leukemia (2). Over the last decade, we have seen an increase in clinical trials of drugs targeting oncoproteins and cancer pathways in various solid tumors. Prominent examples include agents targeting receptor tyrosine kinases (TK), mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway proteins, phosphoinositol-3 kinase (PI3K) pathway components, and the Janus kinase (JAK)¡ªsignal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) pathway. Based on promising activity and improved outcomes, numerous targeted agents have been approved across several disease types. Well-known examples include erlotinib/gefitinib (3) and crizotinib (4) for patients with activating mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) domain and echinoderm microtubule associated protein-like 4- anaplastic lymphoma kinase (EML4-ALK) translocated non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) respectively, vemurafenib for melanoma with BRAF V600E mutation (5), lapatinib for HER2 amplified breast cancer (6) and ruxolitinib for patients with JAK-2 mutation (7)
%U http://apm.amegroups.com/article/view/4177/5064