Personalized medicine in oncology: Small molecule inhibitors, biologics and immunotherapies

Personalized medicine in oncology: Small molecule inhibitors, biologics and immunotherapies Priya Hays, PhD, CEO of Hays Documentation Specialists, discusses innovations and advancements in the development and evaluation of personalized cancer therapies. Advancements in cancer research have led to changes in the treatment of patients with cancer, resulting in novel personalized cancer therapies. The three major classes include small molecule inhibitors, biologics, and cancer immunotherapies. Standard first-line immunotherapies include anti-CTLA-4 inhibitor ipilimumab and anti-PD-1 inhibitor nivolumab. These are considered immune checkpoint inhibitors that remove the breaks in cytotoxic T cells from killing cancer cells. Due to the incidence of non-responders to these first-line immunotherapies, other immunotherapies also belonging to the same immune checkpoint inhibitor class of treatments have been developed and evaluated in clinical trials, and novel therapeutic agents have been developed that could serve as the next-generation immune checkpoint inhibitors, which include anti-LAG-3 and anti-TIGIT antibodies and the inhibitory receptor TIM-3. LAG-3 has been named ‘the third checkpoint inhibitor.’ Clinical trials have been conducted to study and evaluate these three agents. ‘These inhibitory receptors have heralded the ‘next wave of co-inhibitory receptor targets that are being explored in clinical trials,’ as stated in prior reports. (1)