Highlights on Specific Biological Targets; Cyclin-Dependent Kinases, Epidermal Growth Factor Receptors, Ras Protein, and Cancer Stem Cells in Anticancer Drug Development

Abstract

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in worldwide, because of that we need a great effort to discover, determine and understand the main pathways and mechanism of action of new novel anticancer drugs, which highly selective on the cancerous cells over the normal cells. The traditional approaches to the treat cancer depend on surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, according to the medicinal reports the chemotherapy is still the main procedure in the cancer cure or treatment till nowadays, and it is one of the main factors that drops the mortality of cancer in the last years. In the past decades the chemotherapeutic agents were used in the cancer treatment without clear understand on which target, protein, or enzyme that is working, and it was making the inhibition on the whole family of enzymes or receptors which lead to high toxicity and side effects, but nowadays the anticancer agents work with high selectivity on specific subtype of clear targets, and these targets usually present in high percentage in the cancerous cells. In this review article we will summarize some of these specific targets for anticancer drugs like Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs), epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFR), Ras protein, and Cancer stem cells, finally, we will mention some anticancer drugs which approved by FDA in 2018 which work on specific targets.

Key words

cancer - chemotherapy - targets - cyclin-dependent kinases - epidermal growth factor receptors - ras protein - stem cells

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