RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Brain Cancer Drug Discovery: Clinical Trials, Drug Classes, Targets, and Combinatorial Therapies
JF Pharmacological Reviews
JO Pharmacol Rev
FD American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics
SP 1172
OP 1203
DO 10.1124/pharmrev.121.000317
VO 73
IS 4
A1 Aleksandr V. Sokolov
A1 Samira A. Dostdar
A1 Misty M. Attwood
A1 Aleksandra A. Krasilnikova
A1 Anastasia A. Ilina
A1 Amina Sh. Nabieva
A1 Anna A. Lisitsyna
A1 Vladimir N. Chubarev
A1 Vadim V. Tarasov
A1 Helgi B. Schiöth
A2 Michael Gottesman
YR 2021
UL http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/73/4/1172.abstract
AB Brain cancer is a formidable challenge for drug development, and drugs derived from many cutting-edge technologies are being tested in clinical trials. We manually characterized 981 clinical trials on brain tumors that were registered in ClinicalTrials.gov from 2010 to 2020. We identified 582 unique therapeutic entities targeting 581 unique drug targets and 557 unique treatment combinations involving drugs. We performed the classification of both the drugs and drug targets based on pharmacological and structural classifications. Our analysis demonstrates a large diversity of agents and targets. Currently, we identified 32 different pharmacological directions for therapies that are based on 42 structural classes of agents. Our analysis shows that kinase inhibitors, chemotherapeutic agents, and cancer vaccines are the three most common classes of agents identified in trials. Agents in clinical trials demonstrated uneven distribution in combination approaches; chemotherapy agents, proteasome inhibitors, and immune modulators frequently appeared in combinations, whereas kinase inhibitors, modified immune effector cells did not as was shown by combination networks and descriptive statistics. This analysis provides an extensive overview of the drug discovery field in brain cancer, shifts that have been happening in recent years, and challenges that are likely to come.Significance Statement This review provides comprehensive quantitative analysis and discussion of the brain cancer drug discovery field, including classification of drug, targets, and therapies.