The media is abuzz with the news that big drug companies are rolling out drugs that will compete with cancer drugs like Herceptin that target certain pathways or genetic mutations that cause cancer instead of killing the cancer cells themselves. Not exactly. By definition, a targeted medicine does not compete since it hones in on a specific approach or response. Case in point the BMS drug dasatinib which was developed after researchers noticed that a certain subset of patients on Gleevec developed resistance to the drug after a while. Other targeted cancer drugs have the same narrow application at first but then can expand to other uses as the same pathways are implicated in other disease mechanisms…And finally, genetic and protein analysis will determine who are high responders and who are not.
It is getting quite complicated. Better for patients. Which is what matters most. The challenge will be to translate all this into solutions that reduce death and suffering and extending the model to other diseases…
