Deploying Ibrutinib to Lung Cancer: Another Step in the Quest Towards Drug Repurposing
Menée sur des lignées cellulaires et à l'aide de modèles murins, cette étude suggère l'intérêt de l'ibrutinib pour le traitement des patients atteints d'un cancer du poumon non à petites cellules présentant un gène EGFR muté, y compris des patients dont les tumeurs résistent à l'erlotinib
Exploiting the inherent promiscuity of drugs can enable recognition of important “off-target” effects that can be leveraged to repurpose drugs toward medical conditions not originally intended. Perhaps the classic example is the repurposing of imatinib, originally intended for breakpoint cluster region-Abelson murine leukemia viral oncogene homolog 1 (BCR-ABL)-driven chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), toward mast/stem cell growth factor receptor (KIT)-driven gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) tumors (1). Compounds that have already demonstrated safety and utility in one disease can be rapidly redirected toward another disease entity, thereby quickening the pace of clinical trial development and proof of benefit from compounds. It is under this context that the report by Gao and colleagues (2) is important. This group took advantage of the recent US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of ibrutinib, a small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor with activity against the Bruton tyrosine kinase and efficacy in mantle cell lymphoma (3)...
Journal of the National Cancer Institute , éditorial, 2014