Posts tagged ‘pi3 kinase inhibitors’
Future advances in cancer drug development may come from targeting cancer metabolism and the pathways associated with this.
Image Source: Tak W Mak, Stockholm EMCC 2011
That was one of the key messages of Tak Wah Mak (Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto) in his plenary presentation at the recent ESMO/ECCO multidisciplinary cancer congress in Stockholm.
An examples of this is the PI3-Kinase RAS axis that also inhibits glycolysis.
Sally Church in today’s post on Pharma Strategy Blog picks up on this, and how “understanding the process of tumorigenesis, ie tumour formation and growth, is critical to figuring out how to stop it.”
She discusses recent research from MD Anderson Cancer Center on Pyruvate Kinase M2 (PKM2) that is highly expressed in human cancer.
PKM2 plays an important role in glycolysis (Warburg effect) but also has a non-metabolic effect on tumor formation and growth.
The MD Anderson researchers showed how epidermal growth factor (EGFR) activation led to translocation of PKM2, but not PKM1.
You can read more on Pharma Strategy Blog about the significance of these findings and how this might lead to new biomarkers and treatment approaches.
Targeting Tumor Metabolism is one of the plenary sessions at the forthcoming AACR-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics Congress in San Francisco.
As reported by Sally Church, PhD on Pharma Strategy Blog today, the tumor suppressor gene PTEN has an important role to play in breast cancer. Sally previously wrote about the role PTEN plays in non-melanoma skin cancer.
In her Pharma Strategy blog post, Sally discusses research from the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London published online first in the new AACR journal, Cancer Discovery.
Researchers looked at genetic changes found in cancer tumor cells and identified the critical genes associated with the growth of specific cancer subtypes, and those that were not. As Sally describes it, “which are drivers and passengers.” This is important if you want to develop a targeted therapy.
This large scale profiling led to the classification of breast cancers into distinct subtypes. In particular the ICR researchers identified possible targets for PTEN-mutated and oestrogen-receptor positive breast cancers.
As Sally notes this approach if successful “could be replicated in other tumor types.”
You can read more on Pharma Strategy Blog about PTEN as a target, and inhibitors in development such as Semafore’s SF1670.