Word: rituximab
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...Four years ago, for example, researchers at IDEC Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, California, made just such a hit with rituximab, the first drug that successfully targeted proteins on cancer cells. Scientists had learned over the years that cancer cells are studded with an unusually large number of receptacles that compounds essential for survival, including growth factors, can plug into and fuel the cells' growth. Rituximab is a monoclonal antibody, a molecule specifically engineered to fit into the receptacles on non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cells and, in this case, single out the cancer cell for destruction by the immune system. Back...
...That proved far too strong a claim, but monoclonal antibodies have finally begun to live up to more modest expectations. Rituximab was the first, but just a year later, the same approach led to trastuzumab, a drug that keeps growth factors from feeding certain kinds of breast-cancer cells. Such targeted treatments are effective only when the appropriate target exists. Trastuzumab latches onto a receptor known as HER2, which is abnormally abundant in only about 30% of breast-cancer tumors. A biopsy can tell doctors whether a patient is likely to respond to trastuzumab, but they'd hoped to find...
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