Advances in Drug Therapy for Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumour

Gastrointestinal stromal tumour (GIST) is a common gastrointestinal sarcoma located in the stromal cells of the digestive tract, and molecular studies have revealed the pathogenesis of mutations in KIT and PDGFRA genes. Since imatinib opened the era of targeted therapy for GIST, tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) that can treat GIST have been developed successively. However, the lack of new drugs with satisfactory therapeutic standards has made addressing resistance a significant challenge for TKIs in the face of the resistance to first-line and second-line drugs. Therefore, we need to find as many drugs and new treatments that block mutated genes as possible.

We conducted a comprehensive collection of literature using databases, integrated and analysed the selected literature based on keywords and the comprehensive nature of the articles, and finally wrote articles based on the content of the studies.

In this article, we first briefly explained the relationship between GIST and KIT/ PDGFRα and then introduced the related drug treatment. The research progress of TKIs was analyzed according to the resistance of the drugs.

This article describes the research progress of some TKIs and briefly introduces the currently approved TKIs and some drugs under investigation that may have better therapeutic effects, hoping to provide clues to the research of new drugs.