What is targeted therapy?

Nowadays people are afraid of cancer because it is still a difficult problem that cannot be cured. There are many ways to treat cancer. While killing bad cells, good cells will also be killed. Once good cells are killed, the body's resistance will be reduced. Currently, the best way to treat cancer is targeted therapy, which can more accurately and specifically target cancer.

Targeted therapy is a treatment method that targets an identified carcinogenic site at the cellular and molecular level (the site can be a protein molecule inside the tumor cell or a gene fragment).

Corresponding therapeutic drugs can be designed . When the drugs enter the body, they will specifically select carcinogenic sites to combine and act, causing the specific death of tumor cells without affecting the normal tissue cells around the tumor. Therefore, molecular targeted therapy is also called "biological missile."

In addition to conventional surgery , radiotherapy, chemotherapy, biological therapy and traditional Chinese medicine treatment, different targeted therapy technologies can be used for targeted treatment according to the different targets of tumors at the organ tissue and molecular levels. Local lesion targets can be treated with local targeted ablation therapy, targeted radiotherapy, targeted internal irradiation therapy with radioactive particle implantation, high-energy focused ultrasound therapy, intravascular intervention therapy and local drug injection. The target of molecular targeted therapy is the malignant phenotype molecules of tumor cells, acting on specific cell receptors, signal transduction channels and other channels that promote tumor growth and survival, the regulation of angiogenesis and cell cycle, to achieve anti-tumor effects by inhibiting tumor cell growth or promoting apoptosis. Different from traditional cytotoxic chemotherapy, tumor molecular targeted therapy has specific anti-tumor effects and significantly reduced toxicity, opening up a new field of tumor chemotherapy.

With the development of society and technology , the concept of cancer treatment is undergoing fundamental changes, namely, from empirical science to evidence-based medicine, and from cell attack model to targeted treatment model. "Targeted therapy" that uses targeted technology to accurately deliver drugs to tumor areas and "targeted point therapy" that utilizes tumor-specific signal transduction or specific metabolic pathways are hot topics in tumor research.

Depending on the targeted site, tumor targeted therapy can be divided into two categories, namely tumor cell targeted therapy and tumor vascular targeted therapy. Tumor cell targeted therapy uses specific antigens or receptors on the surface of tumor cells as targets, while tumor vascular targeted therapy uses specific antigens or receptors on the surface of newly formed capillary endothelial cells in the tumor area. Although the targeting properties of monoclonal antibodies against tumor cells increase the concentration in local tumor tissue to some extent, these macromolecules still need to pass through the vascular endothelial cell barrier to reach the tumor cell target area, and this process is relatively slow. Vascular targeted drugs, on the other hand, have a great advantage in that they can quickly accumulate in high concentrations at the target site after administration.