Recent Advances in Anticancer Drug Development

Abstract

Over the past five years, a considerable number of new and promising compounds for anticancer chemotherapy has been identified and studied in early clinical trials. Most important, topoisomerase I inhibitors and taxanes are classes of agents that had not been available in the clinical armamentarium and have rapidly gained acceptance as valuable assets. The purpose of this review is to provide a summary of the current state of development for compounds that are in clinical phase I or phase II trials and promise to be available for general use in future years. These compounds include traditional cytostatic antitumor agents with or without novel mechanisms of action (thymidilate synthase inhibitors, folate antagonists, nucleoside analogues, taxanes, topoisomerase inhibitors) as well as more experimental differentiation-inducing agents and antiangiogenesis compounds.