New Chemotherapeutics, Alternative Methods & Old Challenges

Dear Colleagues, 

Chemotherapy, combined or not with surgery and radiotherapy, remains the most important and recommended treatment of the most cancers. However, several drawbacks, like drug resistance and adverse side effects, have limited the adherence and success, though bad outcomes have also stimulated the search for new effective and more secure anticancer drugs. On the other hand, this requires huge institutional efforts and use of a high number of experimental animals, mainly mammals, to achieve such medications, which are used in diagnostics as well as treatments. Alternatives to the animals in testing serving the same purposes that using whole animals do have been available. From the public health point of view, and despite massive investing in oncology research and development from public and private sources, the translation of advances into medicines that substantially enhance the treatment of many cancers remains frustratingly slow even using mammals. Therefore, some doubts might arise. Are alternative methods really adequate? What are the key challenges in anticancer drug development, and how should they be addressed? Less toxic and more effective treatment designs are often the main reasons for drug development. Further, drug development i) offers the opportunity to identify therapeutics medications for the treatment of rare diseases, including some types of cancers, which are generally ignored by R&D marketing programs of pharmaceutical companies; ii) save time and money; iii) improve productivity, and iv) reduce the risks, number of mammals used and human/material resources associated for the development of new drugs and the distance between drug discovery and commercial availability.

Supervised by Dr. Paulo Michel Pinheiro Ferreira and Dr. Gardenia Carmen Gadelha Militão and assisted by Dr. José Roberto de Oliveira Ferreira, this Special Issue invites researchers to contribute with original or review articles focused on techniques for discovering and development of antitumor molecules/formulations considering the traditional and alternative pharmacological, toxicokinetic and toxicogenetic in vitro and in vivo tools to predict bioactivity, toxicity and clinical efficacy to make the P&D of anticancer drugs faster in order to improve patients’ survival, quality of life and reduction of organ-specific side effects.

Dr. Paulo Michel Pinheiro Ferreira
Dr. Gardenia G.C. Militao
Guest Editors

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