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Video

What is targeted therapy and what drugs fall into this category?

Posted by
HealthTree Logo HealthTree
• February 3, 2022

Description

Learn about targeted therapy and drugs of it in this HealthTree University lesson by a cancer specialist.

On this video

Healthtree contact  Eunice Wang, MD, Specialist

Eunice Wang, MD, Specialist

Roswell Park Cancer Institute

Transcript

What is targeted therapy and what drugs fall into this category? So targeted therapy is therapy that is designed to target or destroy something specific to the cancer cell that is not found on normal cells. So conventional chemotherapy has side effects and it affects normal tissue as well as the cancer cells. Target therapy is specifically inhibiting or blocking things that are supposedly in ideal world only found on the cancer cells and thereby sparing normal cells and reducing side effects. So examples of this are FLIT3 inhibitors which target FLIT3 mutated cells in acute myeloid leukemia and can be more potent than conventional chemotherapy. IDH inhibitors that block IDH mutated cells. Probably drug conjugates targeting like CD33 positive, leukemia cells, that type of targeted therapies I think are probably the future. They have much less toxicity and side effects than standard therapies.

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