Anticancer Agent: Challenges and Prospects

Dear Colleagues,

For the past six decades, various approaches for targeting antitumor agents selectively to cancer in vivo have been extensively investigated. For instance, actively targeted drugs and drug delivery systems focus on specific receptors, kinases or other growth factors of tumor cells at a molecular level and these systems are receiving more attention than ever. However, recent clinical results showed that the therapeutic outcomes of such strategies are not as successful as had been expected. Because molecular genomics in cancer cells now reveals numerous molecular mutations even in a single patient tumor. The current report said cancer chemotherapies including recent immunotherapy for solid tumors produced outcome failure rates of 90% (±5) according to governmental agencies and industry.

The heterogeneity of the tumor is another big challenge in the clinic. Most experimental tumor models for the evaluation of anticancer drugs utilize tumors with small sizes (about 5–7 mm in diameter) that are highly vascular and genetically homogeneous, as a result, positive outcomes that were expected are observed. On the contrary, cancers seen in clinical settings are highly variable—the tumor diameter, for example, can be 2–100 mm or even larger, and clinical tumors can have completely different genetic backgrounds. Also, advanced large-size human tumors in clinical settings have suppressed blood flow, which often results in the formation of fibrin clots or thrombi and thus unsatisfactory therapeutic effects are seen.

Under these situations, it is a rational direction to look for more universal characteristics of tumors enabling more effective tumor drug targeting. I strongly believe this special issue, "Anticancer Agent: Challenges and Prospects" will play a critical role in the development of successful anticancer therapy.

I highly appreciate your cheerful contribution to this special issue.

Dr. Waliul Islam
Guest Editor

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• anti-cancer drug design
• drug delivery system
• solid tumor
• tumor microenvironment
• drug mechanism
• chemotherapy
• radiation therapy