Expert review of anticancer therapy
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Expert Rev Anticancer Ther · Mar 2015
ReviewRadium-223 dichloride: a new paradigm in the treatment of prostate cancer.
Radionuclides have been widely used for cancer treatment. Recently, new research about radium-223 dichloride has been conducted in prostate cancer, which reveals that it is the first radiopharmaceutical to demonstrate an improvement in overall survival and time to first symptomatic skeletal event in patients with castration resistant prostate cancer with symptomatic bone metastases. This fact has created a new paradigm in the treatment of prostate cancer landscape, where only chemotherapy and hormone therapy had a role, while β-emitters had been confined exclusively to the role of pain relief with no impact on survival. The aim of this review is to outline current treatment approaches for advanced prostate cancer with a focus on the role of radium-223 dichloride, reviewing patients' profile that make them suitable to therapy and chances for further studies.
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Expert Rev Anticancer Ther · Mar 2015
ReviewNew frontiers in oncology: biosimilar monoclonal antibodies for the treatment of breast cancer.
Trastuzumab is a highly successful monoclonal antibody (mAb) that has been used primarily for the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer. Because of its success and its impending patent expiry in Europe in 2014, a number of copy versions of trastuzumab have been developed and are currently undergoing a comparability exercise for marketing authorization. Although biosimilar products have been approved in Europe since 2006, including two biosimilar mAbs of infliximab approved in 2013, the use of mAbs such as trastuzumab in the cancer setting has raised a number of new concerns. The requirements for the approval of biosimilar mAbs published by the EMA will be discussed and examined in the context of trastuzumab biosimilars to highlight potential controversies.