Figure 3.

The anticancer drug combination challenge. Two successive revolutions in cancer treatment have occurred, around the 2000s with the advent of targeted therapeutics such as the kinase inhibitor imatinib (Glivec®) used to treat chronic myelocytic leukemia and the mAb trastuzumab (Herceptin®) for breast cancer, and then around the 2010s with booming of immunotherapy and the launch of mAbs such as ipilimumab (Yervoy®) and pembrolizumab (Keytruda®) targeting CTLA4 and PD-1, respectively, to treat melanoma. More than 200 anticancer drugs are available to design new combinations. The 80 cytotoxic drugs and 6 mAbs targeting PD-(L)1 offer a wide range of potential combinations.