Volume 20 Issue 7, July 2021

Thirty-five years on from the FDA’s approval of a first monoclonal antibody, these biologics account for nearly a fifth of the agency’s new drug approvals each year.

Protein arginine methyltransferases (PRMTs) regulate numerous biological processes, including transcription, splicing and the DNA damage response. In this article, Barsyte-Lovejoy and colleagues discuss the development of PRMT inhibitors, predominantly for cancer, and describe the challenges and potential new indications in which PRMT inhibition could be therapeutically relevant.

Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) have shown limited efficacy in the treatment of solid tumours. In this Review, Chen and colleagues discuss various engineering strategies to overcome the obstacles that the tumour microenvironment poses to CAR-T cells, to produce next-generation T cells with enhanced specificity and sustained function for the treatment of solid tumours.

Twenty years have passed since the first small-molecule protein kinase inhibitor, imatinib, gained FDA approval. Here, Cohen et al. review advances in improving the potency and specificity of small-molecule protein kinase inhibitors and assess approaches to overcome the challenge of drug resistance. Applications of these compounds in cancers and other disorders, as well as future directions in the field, are discussed.