Getting up close and personal
A decade after the first genetic medication for cancer, trastuzumab, became available, the era of personalised medicine has finally arrived. Trastuzumab, an antibody drug marketed as Herceptin, was aimed at up to one in three breast cancer patients who produced too much of the protein HER-2/neu, which leads to ferocious tumour growth. More recently it has been discovered that when the deadliest form of lung cancer - non-small-cell cancer - occurs in patients who are female or Asian or who have never smoked, it is often due to a growth factor mutation: enter the drugs gefitinib, marketed as Iressa, and erlotinib, sold as Tarceva, designed to hit these genetic targets.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under Research, Non-Small-Cell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.