Abstract
Despite the advancements of medical care and pharmaceutical technologies, unfortunately in recent decades, epidemiological surveys have identified that the population of cancer patients are indeed increasing in multiple regions. So, cancers go on threatening human health and life to a larger and larger extent. A series of special anti-cancer drugs are known as “targeted therapies”. Those anti-cancer drugs work through blocking bioactivities of specific onco-gene or onco-protein so as to prevent the progressions of cancers. Nevertheless, due to the genetic properties of cancers are highly heterogeneous and complex, the anti-cancer therapeutic mechanisms of those drugs are yet fully known. Consequently, those anti-cancer drugs of targeted therapies are only effective for a limited part of cancer patients. Therefore, it is urgent and necessary to study and reveal the full mechanisms that how anti-cancer drugs of targeted therapies are working in vivo. Given that proteins, or proteomes, are the direct effectors of most physiological functions, it could be interesting to study the working mechanisms of anti-cancer targeted therapies from the perspective of proteins and protein biochemistry. To this end, recent research works were selected to introduce how interplay between proteins and anti-cancer targeted therapies were studied, both in pros and cons. Through reviewing these research works, insights of proper and promising research and development paradigm of protein and proteomic researches for precision anti-cancer targeted pharmacotherapies were summarized.
Keywords
Cancer targeted therapy, High throughput sequencing, Protein biochemical research, Proteomics, Post translational modifications, Precision medicine, Precision oncology