A combined treatment using a chemotherapeutic agent and a molecular targeting compound might achieve a better response rate than a chemotherapeutic agent alone.
A c-Met inhibitor might be a promising molecular targeting compound for combating CSCs with SN38 resistance in human gastric cancers.
However, the effects of a combination of a molecular targeting compound and a chemotherapeutic agent in CSCs of gastric cancer remain to be clarified.
With respect to advanced gastric cancer, a combination therapy using a molecular targeting compound and a chemotherapeutic inhibitor might achieve a better response rate not only for chemonative carcinomas but also for chemorefractory carcinomas, compared to therapy with a chemotherapeutic inhibitor alone.
FOLFOX, paclitaxel/5-FU, and paclitaxel/cisplatin are potential combination partners for small molecular-targeting compounds cetuximab or erlotinib (Table 5).
In addition, molecular-targeting compounds as combination partners, such as trastuzumab (monoclonal antibody against ErbB-2), lapatinib (dual EGFR and ErbB-2 tyrosine kinase inhibitor), and cetuximab (monoclonal antibody against EGFR), are studied, too (Table 5).
PPARs were initially described as molecular targets for compounds that induce peroxisome proliferation (Issemann and Green, 1990).
To that aim, we used HitPick (Liu et al., 2013), a recently developed in silico target prediction method to predict the molecular targets of compounds.
In the present study, we showed that gene signature-based analysis can classify oncogenic pathway inhibitors in a target pathway-dependent manner and is a powerful tool to evaluate the molecular targets of compounds.
Using HCS to predict potential pathways or the molecular targets of compounds identified in phenotypic screens is a hypothesis-generating approach that can provide new perspectives for understanding complex diseases with undiscovered pathogenic processes.
