Busting the Breast Cancer with AstraZeneca’s Gefitinib

Table 3

Milestones in the discovery and development of Gefitinib.

Year	Attributes
1960	Stanley Cohen isolated EGF from mouse submandibular gland [133]
1980s	Stanley Cohen discovered that EGFR has kinase activity [134], use of anti-EGFR antibodies [135], and discovery of EGFR-TKI having selective inhibition of tyrosine kinase activity [136]
1990s	Discovery of potent selective tyrosine kinase inhibitors of 4-anilinoquinazoline [127, 137]
2000s	Synthesis of Gefitinib [128], testing of efficacy of Gefitinib [13]
2002	Gefitinib approved for NSCLC [138], phase II clinical trials against breast cancer
2003	FDA approval of Gefitinib [139], clinical benefit in locally advanced/metastatic tumor with ER+ cancer
2010	Multicentric trial on postmenopausal women [140]
2013	Nanoparticles synthesized with Gefitinib [141]
2015	GEF accepted by the FDA as the first-line therapy against tumors bearing EGFR mutation and NSCLC [7, 20]
2016	Double-blinded, placebo-controlled multicentric trial on hormone receptor-positive breast cancer failed to show any clinical benefit [142]