[Immunotoxins and immunocytokines].

Cytokines and biological toxins represent two potent classes of biomolecules that have long been explored for their potential as therapeutics. Considerable side effects and poor pharmacokinetics frequently observed with both have limited their broad application. Recombinant protein engineering has allowed the construction of immunocytokines and immunotoxins that seek to exploit the advantageous properties of immunoglobulins to address these issues.

Insulin-like growth factor receptor type I as a target for cancer therapy.

After more than 20 years of extensive work, insulin-like growth factor receptor 1 (IGF-IR) is still an attractive target for drug development. Due to its close homology to insulin receptor, IGF-IR is of interest for antibody design while antibody great specificity allows to discriminate between the two receptors. Major efforts from a large number of pharmaceutical companies are invested to evaluate the efficacy of such molecules in human without so far an obvious success.

Biological significance and targeting of c-Met tyrosine kinase receptor in cancer.

c-Met is a tyrosine kinase receptor largely described to be involved in cancer progression and metastasis. In such pathologic situation, many alterations of this receptor were noticed that include transcriptional overexpression, gene amplification, somatic or germline mutations and/or ligand dependent autocrine/paracrine loops. More recently it has also been suggested that c-Met would be involved in resistance to targeted therapies directed towards EGFR or angiogenesis.

Selection criteria for c-Met-targeted therapies: emerging evidence for biomarkers.

Extensive development of targeted therapies emphasize the critical need for biomarkers and major efforts have been engaged to identify screening, prognostic, stratification and therapy-monitoring markers. One of the challenges in translating preclinical studies into effective clinical therapies remains the accurate identification of a responsive subsets of patients. Studies on trastuzumab demonstrated that patient response could be specifically correlated with the amplification of the Her2 gene.

[Monoclonal antibodies for treating infectious diseases].

Monoclonal antibodies (mAb) are attractive biologic drugs because of their specificity and well understood mechanisms of action. So far, most mAb have been developed for treating cancers or immunological disorders. However, the antibiotic resistance crisis, emerging viral diseases and bioterrorism have increased the development of anti-infectious mAb, for which more than twenty clinical trials are in progress to evaluate their safety and efficacy.

[Immunoconjugates, drug-armed antibodies to fight against cancer].

Monoclonal antibodies constitute a growing class of therapeutic agents. They are classically used in combination with chemotherapeutic drugs for cancer treatment. The concept of coupling a cytotoxic agent to an antibody can be viewed as a means to confer a selectivity for tumoral cells to highly cytotoxic drugs which cannot be used in human, or a higher power to antibodies which have a low anti-tumoral activity on their own.