Biography
Biography: B Ravi Shankar
Abstract
Chemotherapy for cancer treatment has been one of the major medical advances in the last few decades. However, the drugs used for chemotherapy have a narrow therapeutic index, with varied toxicities ranging from nausea to life threatening anaphylactic reactions, and often the responses produced are unpredictable. In contrast, targeted therapy that has been introduced in recent years is directed against cancer-specific molecules and signaling pathways and thus has more limited nonspecific toxicities. Discoveries important for survival, proliferation, and metastasis of different cancer cells combined with technological advances have produced agents that target proteins or genes critical in the neoplastic process. Tyrosine kinases are an especially important target because they play an important role in the modulation of growth factor signaling. Targeted therapies are of various types like tyrosine kinase inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies and conjugated antibodies. In this article we would like to mention about the improvement in treatment options, increase in response to treatment to various solid tumours as well as patient compliance to the treatment with targeted therapy especially Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors (TKIs) and monoclonal antibodies (mab).