Lung cancer represents one of the top malignancies in cancer-related incidence and mortality worldwide. Throughout the years, efforts have been made to develop new therapeutic options that can provide an improved quality of life and prolonged survival. It has been known that non-small cell lung cancer has benefited from comprehensive research.
Previous studies have shown the potential benefit of targeted therapy, which has led to the implementation of personalized medicine. Unfortunately, disease progression was identified, creating the need to develop new generation molecules and exploiting possible treatment associations.
Therefore, in the review paper published in BJBMS, the authors have tried to assess the main therapeutic options which target the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene with their mechanisms of action and resistance. Furthermore, they studied the identification methods and the current knowledge of treatment combinations with targeted therapy.
In order to enhance the recent data on this topic, the authors have used two of the main databases for medical research. By applying specified criteria, they have selected the most relevant articles to present an accurate and highly – qualitative paper.
The results of this review article highlight the advantages and limitations for each tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), the testing methods used to identify ALK gene rearrangement, and the other strategies to overcome this resistance.
Being aware of the physician’s treatment choices can provide optimized care to this selected category of patients. Nevertheless, this topic represents a continuous research field due to the unmet needs so far.
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