Gouji Toyokawa, Takashi Seto, Mitsuhiro Takenoyama, Yukito Ichinose
In 2007, the rearrangement of anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) was identified to be associated with the pathogenesis of a subset of patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Surprisingly, approximately 4 years after the discovery of ALK rearrangement in lung cancer, the first-in-class ALK inhibitor (ALKi), crizotinib, was approved for metastatic ALK-rearranged NSCLC by the US Food and Drug Administration. Subsequently, next-generation ALKis, such as alectinib and ceritinib, have been developed, and some of them have been applied in the clinical setting...
March 2017: Clinical Lung Cancer