Tongyoo Assanee
Department of Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, Thammasat University, Pathumthani, Thailand.
J Med Assoc Thai. 2010 Dec;93 Suppl 7:S311-23.
Nowadays, malignancies still are crucial problems of healthcare system in many aspects including efficacy of therapeutic modalities, quality of patients' life and cost of treatment. The understanding of genetic alterations and intracellular pathways are very helpful to define the pathologic abnormalities specific to each cancer Consequently, there have been recently discovered agents which destroy the cancer cells with higher specificity than previously used agents. "Targeted therapy" is established to call this group of drugs because its mechanism of action selectively targets on tumor-specific abnormal cellular processes. These aimed extracellular or intracellular mechanisms are mainly divided into 3 groups; (1) activating natural immune system directly against tumor cells, (2) inhibiting cellular proliferation, (3) inducing tumor anti-angiogenesis. The targeted drugs are currently studied to establish the appropriate regimens for cancers with or without concurrent chemotherapy. It is important to understand and keep updated in these novel agents for better clinical outcome of cancer patients.
如今，恶性肿瘤在许多方面仍是医疗保健系统的关键问题，包括治疗方式的疗效、患者生活质量和治疗成本。对基因改变和细胞内信号通路的了解有助于明确每种癌症特有的病理异常。因此，最近发现了一些药物，它们比以前使用的药物具有更高的特异性来破坏癌细胞。“靶向治疗”被用来称呼这一类药物，因为其作用机制选择性地针对肿瘤特异性异常细胞过程。这些目标性的细胞外或细胞内机制主要分为3组：（1）直接激活针对肿瘤细胞的天然免疫系统，（2）抑制细胞增殖，（3）诱导肿瘤抗血管生成。目前正在研究靶向药物，以确定适用于联合或不联合化疗的癌症治疗方案。了解并及时更新这些新型药物对于癌症患者获得更好的临床疗效很重要。
