Here's what today's NY Times had to say about ENMD's compounds:
May 5, 1998
Cancer Drug Faces Years of Testing; Hope Is Instantaneous
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Two Drugs Eradicate Tumors in Mice (May 3)
By IAN FISHER
EW YORK -- Dr. Larry Norton, a prominent oncologist in New York City, received a
telephone call at his home at 7:30 a.m. Monday from a rich and very sick man.
"Would a large infusion of cash," the patient asked, "be able to get me the drug any quicker?"
The patient was referring not to one but two drugs -- angiostatin and endostatin -- that have long
stirred cautious excitement in the world of cancer research. Now that excitement -- less cautious and
steeped in the hope of the sick and dying -- appears to be flooding out of the laboratory after
reports that the earliest tests involving the drugs have eradicated tumors in mice with no side effects.
On Monday, the stock price of Entremed, the small Maryland biotech company formed to make and
market the drugs, rose $39.75 to $51.81 -- and was trading briefly at over $80 a share. The price
climbed by a factor of six in the first two minutes after the market opened at 9:30 a.m., and it
continued throughout the day, making it perhaps the most chaotic day for any stock in years. Nor
was the interest in biotechnology companies limited to Entremed, as many small companies shared in
the surge of interest about promising cancer treatments.
Many, but by no means all, cancer institutes, doctors and support groups for cancer patients
reported a surge of phone calls from people desperate to merely curious. Chat rooms on the Internet
were filled with heartbreaking talk: "If this proves to be the thing that could have cured my baby,"
wrote one man whose daughter has cancer, "it will be devastating to me."
For Norton, the interest is double edged. On one hand, he said, it is good that cancer patients and
the public learn about the research, which has been carried out for several years.
But on the other, he worries that cancer patients will put too much stock in a treatment that has not
been proved on anything but mice, and often medicines that work on mice do not help humans. Just
Monday, he said a patient who had been operated on for breast cancer asked why she should go
through post-operative chemotherapy that would help her when the new drug -- she was certain --
would be on the market within a few years.
"This happens every time there is a scientific report about something that has to do with cancer," said
Norton, head of the division of medical oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in
Manhattan. "People's expectations get really inflated.
"You have to understand," Norton added. "I am hopeful this is going to turn out to be justified. This
is a very exciting idea. Nevertheless we don't have any hard data."
The spike in interest came after an article in The New York Times on Sunday -- followed by other
newspaper and television reports -- on the history and progress of the drugs as they are being
prepared to go into clinical trials on humans.
Entremed, the company that will produce the drugs, released a statement Monday that it will take
between 12 and 18 months before the first stages of the trials begins. With evaluation and further
rounds of testing, it could take several years before the drugs are available on the market -- if they
become available at all.
Several cancer experts said Monday that the trials could be especially complicated given that the
new drugs work on a principle unlike other treatments, like chemotherapy, which attack the tumors
themselves and are often accompanied with side effects. Angiostatin and endostatin attack the blood
vessels that feed tumors, starving them of the blood they need to grow, and in mice, have done so
without the side effects.
The drugs were discovered by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher at Children's Hospital in
Boston, and even he has urged caution about its promise. But for all the qualifications and warnings
about possible failure, hope is rising among cancer patients.
"I'm getting faxes and e-mails," said Dr. Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute,
who called putting the drugs into clinical trials his highest priority. "People want the drug. They're
asking me, 'Couldn't we just compassionately release it?' I have to tell them, 'It doesn't exist.' "
"It's such a roller coaster for people whose relatives are dying," he added. "It's very difficult to
maintain understanding when something is available in animals but not in people."
On Long Island, where the rates of breast cancer are higher than average, Francine Kritchek,
co-founder and past president of One in Nine, an advocacy organization, said: "The phone has been
ringing off the hook. Everyone is very excited."
"We're very, very impatient about the process," she added. "We hope to see it speeded up. We
would like to see the pharmaceutical companies that are making this drug really make it a top priority
so that clinical trials will begin. they're playing with people's lives here."
In California, Jack Fisher of the Sacramento Center for Hematology and Medical Oncology, said
Monday that a woman with lymphoma in remission had asked him about the drugs after reading
about them.
"She was very excited about it," he said, adding that he told her: "Maybe in three years, I'll have this
available."
"What we're doing with chemo will look so crude" in 20 years if the tests are successful, Fisher
predicted.
In Los Angeles, Dr. Derek Raghavan, chief of medical oncology at the University of Southern
California and associate director of the Norris Cancer Research Center, said that several of his
patients asked about the new cancer drugs during examinations Monday.
"They did not ask for them by name, but expressed interest in whether they ware useful in their
situation, whether they are safe and whether they are cancer killers or cancer stoppers," he said.
"Patients are interested and they are very educated these days." |
