Anticancer therapeutics: a brief account on wide refinements

Abstract

The flustering rise in cancer incidence along with treatment anomalies has made cancer the second leading cause of death globally. The total annual economic impact of cancer is pronounced and is increasing. Besides the lack of proper curative therapy, treatment associated adverse effects, drug resistance, and tumor relapse are the instigations behind increased morbidity and mortality. Meanwhile, the survival rate has inclined impressively. In the last few decades, cancer treatment has undergone wide refinements aiming towards cancer prevention, complete tumor regression, subsiding treatment adverse effects, improving patient's life standard and avoiding tumor relapse. Chemotherapy has been successfully extended towards natural, cheaper and bioactive anti-inflammatory agents manifesting potent anticancer activity. Antibody-based cancer therapy has become well established as a vital and effective strategy for treating hematological malignancies as well as solid tumors. Individualized immunotherapy is becoming the forefront of cancer treatment enabling personalized, precise and patient's cancer mutanome specific adjustable regimen. The emergence of anti-neoangiogenesis and cancer stem cell targeting techniques have dropped cancer recurrence significantly. Advancements in hyperthermia and photodynamic therapies along with improvements in cancer vaccination have declined death rate and amplified survival rate convincingly.

Keywords: Anticancer therapeutics; cancer targeting; conventional and non-conventional chemotherapy; hyperthermia treatment; monoclonal antibodies (mAb’s); photodynamic therapy (PDT).

Figure 1

(A) Showing BIAcore Profiles for SIP antibody and anti DLK1 scFv antibody against human DLK1-Fc recombinant fusion protein (B) SIP (F8) and SIP (EB3) radio-iodinated preparations. The results are shown as injected dose % per tumor tissue gram (% ID/g). Adapted From [49].