Advances in Targeted Therapies Tutorial - National Cancer Institute
Advances in Targeted Therapies Tutorial
- Introduction
Introduction
In This Section:
- How are Targeted Therapies Linked to Personalized Medicine?
- What Is Standard Chemotherapy?
- How Are Targeted Therapies Different?
- What Makes a Good Target?
How are Targeted Therapies Linked to Personalized Medicine?
Targeted therapies are transforming the way people treat cancer. With help from molecular biology and genomic sequencing technologies, it is now possible to discover good therapeutic targets within cancer cells and then to design treatments that selectively interfere with them.Targeted therapies have already begun to make personalized medicine a reality and will continue to help doctors tailor cancer treatment based on the characteristics of an individual's cancer. As many new types of targeted therapies become available, patients will need help deciding among them. Health care professionals should become familiar with the concept of targeted therapies so they can communicate with their patients about these new approaches and help them make better informed treatment decisions.
- What are targeted therapies?
- What do these new treatments target?
- Which targeted cancer therapies are currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)?
- How can I find clinical trials that are evaluating targeted therapies?
What Is Standard Chemotherapy?
Over the years, oncologists have prescribed what we now call standard chemotherapy because they found by trial and error that these drugs worked. They reduced the cancer burden in many of their patients, largely by killing rapidly dividing cells.How Are Targeted Therapies Different?
Unlike standard chemotherapy, targeted therapies are designed to interact with specific molecules that are part of the pathways and processes used by cancer cells to grow, divide, and spread throughout the body. Targets are chosen very carefully. When researchers discover a potentially vulnerable molecule involved in a cancer process or pathway, they validate it by doing more research, and then, if all goes well, they design new therapies to disrupt its activity with great precision.In summary, targeted therapies are different because:
- They act on specific molecular targets that have been identified through research, while most standard chemotherapies act on all rapidly dividing cells.
- They are deliberately chosen or designed to interact with their target, while many standard chemotherapies were identified through trial and error.
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