Tyrosine kinase inhibitors with the indication: in Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia.
Tyrosine kinase inhibitors with the indication: in Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia.
Nilotinib is a phenylamino-pyrimidine derivative that exhibits 20- to 30-fold higher affinity for the BCR-ABL oncoprotein than imatinib in vitro.
Like imatinib, nilotinib attaches only to the inactive conformation of BCR-ABL and binds with high affinity to the ATP-binding site. Attachment to the BCR-ABL binding pocket is possible even in the presence of mutations that cause resistance to imatinib. While nilotinib predominantly targets BCR-ABL, imatinib has a comparatively higher affinity for platelet derived growth factor receptor (PDGFR) tyrosine kinase. Listing the different tyrosine kinases by decreasing drug affinity, the tyrosine kinase preference for nilotinib is BCR-ABL > PDGFR > KIT and for imatinib PDGFR > KIT > BCR-ABL.
A notable side effect of nilotinib therapy is the occurrence of ulerythema ophryogenes as well as generalized keratosis pilaris (Leong WM 2016; Tawil MH et al 2017).