Mutations, including at the gatekeeper residue, are a common mechanism of drug resistance to kinase inhibitors. The current approach, using a cellular screen expressing the mutant kinase of interest, can be applied to identify novel agents specifically against drug resistance or oncogenic mutations implicated in human cancers. Such agents may truly be cancer selective and clinically more potent and less toxic than those that also concurrently inhibit the wild type kinase. The agents described here are unique in that they inhibit both the drug sensitizing and resistance mutations but are selective against WT EGFR23,24,25. Further studies are needed to determine whether this class of EGFR inhibitors will be clinically effective in patients with EGFR mutant cancers harboring EGFR T790M mediated acquired drug resistance.
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