Oral multikinase inhibitor regorafenib for the treatment of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer

Abstract

SUMMARY Regorafenib is an oral small molecule inhibitor of multiple kinases involved in pathogenic processes, such as oncogenesis, tumor angiogenesis and maintenance of the tumor microenvironment, whose efficacy has been recently demonstrated in the treatment of pretreated metastatic colorectal cancer patients. The introduction of regorafenib into clinical practice allows medical oncologists to offer a new line of therapy to patients who have already received all of the other available drugs. Nevertheless, some issues deserve to be further examined in order to improve our knowledge of this drug’s potentialities and to better integrate its use in the daily routine, including the evaluation of response beyond convential size-based response evaluation criteria in solid tumors, the identification of molecular predictors of benefit, and the investigation of the potential role of regorafenib in different settings and in combination with other agents.