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
