Cancer Signaling Pathways and Targeted Therapy

The course provides the basics of cell signaling and how the cell division is controlled in the multicellular organisms. The course discusses each signaling pathway and the targeted therapies developed for it. Importantly, the course focuses on delivering the real-life examples from clinical trials so that the participant can have a robust idea on the benefits that the targeted therapies provide while being aware of the challenges that face the medical field. The participant at the end of the course has to know that there is no silver bullet for all cancers, not only that but also how the pharmaceutical industry shifted their focus from the histological segmentation of patients to the genomic one, which then rewarded them with better results and more drug approvals that tend to reach up to 40% from total fda approved drugs each year. Last but not least, the participant in that course will get familiar with several side effects of the inhibition of certain pathways, and how the same pathway can lead to different outcomes in different cell types.

The course will discuss only the MAPK, PI3K, Angiogenesis-HIF , Apoptosis-BCL2 (soon), and briefly the PDL1 signaling. In addition, the course will discuss several well known oncogenic mutations in the receptors and their targeted therapies.