The future of BRAF inhibitors

Posted by rob on April 1, 2011 under Uncategorized | Comments are off for this article

It is daunting for even the most dedicated of scholars to track the alphabet soup of promising molecular targets and pathways. But last year a BRAF mutation joined the handful of oncogenes that can be therapeutically targeted by a selective inhibitor. Researchers reported a striking regression of metastatic melanoma tumors.?A major breakthrough,? said an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The editorial, ?Melanoma?An Unlikely Poster Child for Personalized Cancer Therapy,? was published in August alongside the phase I results of one of the experimental inhibitors (RG7204/PLX4032, Roche) by Keith Flaherty, MD (MGH) and his co-investigators.In the trial, 81 percent of the 32 patients in the extension cohort (whose cancers carried the signature BRAF mutation) saw a te…
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