BioSeeker Group Continues Study on Late Stage Protein Kinase Inhibitors

BioSeeker Group has studied the progress of late developmental stage protein kinase inhibitor projects.

(PRWEB) June 3, 2004 -- Protein kinase inhibitors (PKI) are currently in a position of being able to change the future treatments of cancer. Many newly approved and late stages candidates target kinases and kinase signaling pathways. We have recently experienced the approval of Avastin, Gleevec, Iressa, Erbitux and Herceptin, and a variety of companies are working on different drugs. Many of the big players are competing.

New top class drugs such as Angiozyme, BAY 43-9006, Neovastat, Tarceva, Flavopiridol, PTK787 together with Avastin, Gleevec, Iressa and Erbitux have been included in this progression analysis. BioSeeker has identified and structured most of the phase III clinical trial projects currently performed on these drugs.

Preclinical models have demonstrated synergistic effects for many of these agents when combined with either chemotherapy or radiotherapy, leading to great enthusiasm regarding their ultimate contribution to cancer therapy. In order to be fully efficient several PKI often have to be used in combinatory treatment regimes. Consequently, information on this important factor has been included in the structure of the study to generate a more complete description of the late stage clinical trial landscape. More than 100 clinical studies have been identified.

Uncertainties still remain. Illustrated by the previous phase III studies, evaluating Iressa in combination with standard cytotoxic therapy, failure to demonstrate survival advantage in advanced NSCLC compared with chemotherapy alone. Some late stage projects have eventually been discontinued. Nevertheless one might expect continued efforts to develop agents against protein kinases, since one of the most common domains that are encoded by cancer genes is the protein kinase.

Except the late stage drugs a large number of investigational new agents targeting tyrosine kinase are in preclinical and/or early clinical programs of drug development.

Protein kinases are a broad range of proteins with different properties and functions in a cell. Phosphorylation of target molecules as a step in signal transduction or enzyme regulation is the common feature of kinases. Generally, kinases can be divided in to two main groups; serine/threonine and tyrosine kinases.

Read more at www.BioSeeker.com

BioSeeker Group is an independent, privately owned company based in Sweden. We focus on business, competitive intelligence in biotech and life science and operate in two business areas: consulting and publishing. Our mission is to excel our customer's business operations by objective and unbiased research and analysis.