Therapeutic application of anti-growth factor receptor antibodies.

The application of monoclonal antibodies for the treatment of human cancer has been under extensive study for nearly two decades. With the advent of recombinant antibody technology, which makes humanized antibody or human-mouse chimeric antibody available for clinical trials, significant progress has been made in the past several years. In this article, we present an overview of recent research on anti-growth factor receptor antibodies. This research aims to modulate the function of growth factor receptors or to exploit the overexpression of these receptors on cancer cells for targeted therapy. The pharmacologic blockade of receptors with antireceptor antibody has been explored as anticancer therapy, both alone and in combination with conventional chemotherapy, or with novel inhibitors acting on various steps of signal transduction pathways. There also has been progress in research on intracellular antibodies, bispecific antibodies, antibody-fusion molecules, and antireceptor antibodies as a means of nonviral gene therapy. This review focuses primarily on monoclonal antibodies directed against the epidermal growth factor receptor family.