| abstract |
The present invention discloses and claims novel pharmaceutical compositions, methods, and kits used for the contemporaneous, heterogeneously-oriented, multi-targeted therapeutic modification and/or modulation of cellular metabolic anomalies or other undesirable physiological conditions, including cancer, where the normal cellular biochemical function and/or the expression levels of various proteins/enzymes (i.e., the target molecules) are abnormal and must be modified and/or modulated in order to treat these metabolic anomalies or other undesirable physiological conditions, including cancer. The aforementioned target molecules, by way of non-limiting example, include: anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK), mesenchymal epithelial transition (MET) kinase, the receptor tyrosine kinase (ROS1), epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), peroxiredoxin (Prx), excision repair cross-complementing protein 1 (ERCC1), insulin growth factor 1 receptor (IGF1R), ribonucleotide reductase (RNR), tubulin, farnesyltransferase, and various other classes of proteins/enzymes. Additionally, the present invention discloses and claims methods and kits for (a) the selection of subjects for treatment; (b) the determination of the most effective medicinal agent(s) to be administered in combination with the administration of the sulfur-containing, amino acid-specific small molecules of the present invention; (c) the dosage of the medicinal agent(s) to be administered; (d) the determination of the length and/or number of treatment cycles; (e) the adjustment of the specific medicinal agent(s) used and the dosage administered during treatment; and/or (f) ascertaining the potential treatment responsiveness of the specific disease to the medicinal agents (s) selected for administration to a subject suffering from one or more types of: (i) cancer or (ii) metabolic anomalies or other undesirable physiological conditions by quantitatively determining the level of the abnormal biochemical activity and/or abnormal expression of any combination of the aforementioned target molecules; by use of quantitative measurement methodologies including, but not limited to: fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), nucleic acid microarray analysis, immunohistochemistry (IHC), radioimmunoassay (RIA), quantitative immunofluorescence and/or automated quantitative analysis; ELISA and flow cytometry-based analyses; PCR coupled with MS approaches; mass spectroscopy-based methods; and X-ray crystallography, and other related analytic methodologies. |