The moon   Credit: NASA

There was a frustrating point during the development of today’s target focus when one harried researcher turned to me and drolly noted,

“It’s like trying to go to the moon with just a plastic rocket on hand!”

You could see where he was coming from… we had a oncogene, some nice preclinical data, numerous approaches to tackling the target in the clinic and yet none – not one of them – were panning out as expected.

Failure after failure hit the niche, not all for the same reasons…

Too toxic, not enough activity, narrow therapeutic window – it was all there and not all of the issues were predicted in preclinical experiments either.  Some observers even began to question whether the target was in fact, a valid oncogene.

Then came some success and the floodgates opened.

These days we know a lot more about what works, what doesn’t and where things are headed.  We might not be going to the moon yet, but things are headed in the right direction.

In the first of a four-part series we take a look at the troubled waters and learn how the situation was rescued by a few smart scientists and companies invested in finding the right cell/right compartment to aim at…

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