*AV*--The next ENMD or the nail in ENMD's coffin?????
BTW-I am glad I bailed out of ENMD and may have to lick my wounds on the June PUTs. As of now the CALLs look like it was the right way to go but you never know. Oh well, I can accept this little setback.
Now, onto "son of ENMD". Just came across this:
Thursday May 7, 2:22 am Eastern Time
UCLA researchers test new cancer drug on humans
By Mark Egan
LOS ANGELES, May 6 (Reuters) - A potential treatment for cancer that
kills tumors by starving them of their blood supply is being tested on
humans by doctors at the University of California here.
The drug has been in Phase I trials on 30 patients at the Jonsson
Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Los
Angeles since September of last year. Called SU5416, the drug
developed by Redwood City, California-based Sugen Inc (SUGN - news) is an angiogenesis inhibitor, which like other recently publicized treatments, completely wiped out tumors in mice.
Competing angiogenesis inhibitor drugs from EntreMed Inc (ENMD-news),
angiostatin and endostatin, received wide-spread media coverage in
recent days when it was revealed the drugs had killed tumors in mice.
While those drugs are at least a year away from being tested on
humans, doctors at UCLA are already encouraged by early trials of
SU5416 on humans.
''We are very excited about this experimental treatment,'' said UCLA's
Dr. Lee Rosen.
''In the lab, SU5416 made all kinds of tumors shrink or die, no matter
where in the body they were. We're hoping for exactly the same results
in humans,'' he said.
SU5416 and the EntreMed drugs are just two of the new treatments for
cancer being tested.
More than 300 new therapies are currently being tested, ranging from
drugs that directly target tumors, to vaccines that turn the body's
defenses against tumors, to gene therapy that aims to stop cancer at
the most basic level.
SU5416 is a chemical that kills tumors by stopping the growth of new
blood vessels to a tumor.
Since cancer cells divide much faster than other cells in the body,
they need more nourishment from blood to stay alive. By blocking that blood supply the cancerous tumor dies.
The process of growing arteries is called angiogenesis, so the drugs
are known as angiogenesis inhibitors.
''This drug made tumors disappear in mice and we're very hopeful, but
it's very far away from being the miracle cure for human cancers,''
Rosen said.
Rosen said the New York Times article published on Sunday about
EntreMed's angiogenesis inhibitors unfairly painted those drugs as a
miracle cure.
''The fact that (angiostatin and endostatin) were reported as a
miracle cure and we're going to cure cancer in the next couple of
years was a tremendous overstatement,'' Rosen said. ''It did a
terrible disservice to patients and their families.''
Phase I trials, such as UCLA's trial of SU5416, are aimed at
determining dosage, side affects and a schedule for treatment.
Subsequent Phase II and Phase III trials study how effective the drug
is at treating cancer.
''I'm very encouraged. We are beginning to see things that are
clinically meaningful but we're not curing cancer right and left
yet,'' Rosen said of the Phase I trial, adding that side-effects so
far were minimal.
''I'm very hopeful that this will be an advance in the treatment of
all cancers,'' he said.
At this early stage, however, Rosen cautioned that the drug may not be
as effective as early trials suggest -- like many other cancer treatments that have failed to prove effective.
''It's too early to tell about any of the (angiogenesis inhibitor)
drugs in this class,'' he said.
Rosen said patients should be wary of studies that talk of curing
cancer in mice, which are much easier to treat than humans.
''Mice have shorter lives so you can see results very quickly,'' he
said. ''You start with mice because it's better to kill mice than humans.
Thursday May 7, 12:02 am Eastern Time
Scientists try to dampen cancer drug frenzy
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) - Two of the scientists caught up in the
uproar over experimental cancer drugs tried to damp down the frenzy on
Wednesday.
The developer of two of the drugs -- angiostatin and endostatin -- Dr.
Judah Folkman, canceled a planned appearance at a prostate cancer
seminar when he learned television cameras would be there.
And Nobel laureate Dr. James Watson made public a letter to the New
York Times, whose story on Sunday sparked the frenzy, in which he
denied making highly optimistic comments which the story attributed to him.
The New York Times report that the drugs had starved cancers in mice
by cutting the blood supply to the tumors boosted shares in the
Rockville, Maryland-based company backing the drugs, Entremed (ENMD -
news). Calls poured in to the company, to Folkman and to the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Folkman, of Harvard University and Children's Hospital in Boston, said people misunderstood what role angiostatin and endostatin might play in the battle against cancer.
''However they will be used, they will be added to chemotherapy and radiotherapy and gene therapy and immunotherapy and vaccine therapy,'' Folkman was quoted as saying by the Boston Globe newspaper.
He has stressed that the drugs had only worked in mice. ''It's got a ways to go in people, but there is hope to get there,'' he said.
The New York Times article, by health writer Gina Kolata, quoted Watson as saying Folkman ''is going to cure cancer in two years.''
Some Wall Street analysts said the apparent endorsement by Watson, who won the Nobel for helping discover the ''double helix'' structure of DNA, was a key factor that inspired the EntreMed rally.
Watson, who now directs the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York state's Long Island, said he had been misquoted. In a letter to the newspaper, a copy of which was sent to Reuters, he wrote:
''Ms. Kolata reported that I predicted that Judah Folkman would cure cancer in two years. My recollection of the conversation to which she refers, however, is quite different.
''What I told Ms. Kolata, at a dinner party six weeks ago, was that endostatin should be in NCI clinical trials by the end of this year, and that we would know about one year after that whether they (sic) were effective.''
Watson's spokeswoman Wendy Goldstein told Reuters he felt very strongly about setting the record straight. ''He did not make such a statement,'' she said, adding that Watson felt the newspaper's version of what he had said ''offered what could very well prove to be false hope to a great many people.''
Dr. Ted Gansler of the American Cancer Society said the impact of the story showed how desperate victims were.
''One problem is this impatience, which of course is understandable in that many, many people are in an urgent situation now,'' he said.
According to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), it takes on average 15 years to bring an experimental drug out of the lab and into human patients.
Only one in 1,000 compounds tested makes it into clinical safety trials in humans, and only one in 20 of these are eventually approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Other companies working on cancer drugs complained about the coverage that angiostatin and endostatin got.
''The fact that (they) were reported as a miracle cure and we're going to cure cancer in the next couple of years was a tremendous overstatement,'' Dr. Lee Rosen, a cancer researcher at the University of California Los Angeles.
Rosen has already progressed to human testing of another, similar drug called SU5416, developed by Redwood City, California-based Sugen Inc (SUGN - news).
Rosen said patients should be wary of cancer cures in mice, which are much easier to treat than humans. He said he was ''very excited'' about SU5416.
BTW-The price of SUGN has really done nothing relative to these news releases. Does this mean that no one wants to jump on the SUGN bandwagon even though they are further along the road with this type of drug??? Hmmm!!!, maybe the ENMD investors haven't seen these articles or the stock is being artifically inflated until some behind the scenes mayhem is completed. It is a pause to wonder why a similar set of drugs, further down the road, has not drawn a great deal of attention in its stock price.
Andrew |
