Drug sales confirm clinical advantage of multi‐target inhibition of drug escapes by anticancer kinase inhibitors

Abstract The clinical advantage of co‐targeting cancer drug escape has been indicated by the percentage of these co‐targeting drugs among all multi‐target drugs in clinics and clinical trials. This clinical advantage needs to be further interrogated from such perspectives as the clinical impact of multi‐target inhibition of drug‐escape mediators. This impact may be reflected by drug sales data, that is, multi‐target inhibition of higher number of drug‐escape mediators favors the expanded coverage of drug‐resistant patients leading to higher sales. We investigated whether this expectation is followed by the 25 FDA‐approved anticancer kinase inhibitors, which were divided into 11 groups of comparable therapeutic mechanisms and approval years. We found 19 (76%) drugs to follow and 3 (12%) drugs not to follow this expectation. The remaining two (8%) and one (4%) drugs cannot be assessed due to insufficient data and incomparability. Therefore, drug sales strongly indicate the clinical advantage of multi‐target inhibition of cancer drug escapes.