It moved up a couple of points after initial news release came out. Here's the latest, don't know if B43 is Novartis or not though.
Saturday, December 4 11:31 AM SGT
Promising leukemia drugs could change the face of cancer treatment
CHICAGO, Dec 3 (AFP) -
Two new experimental leukemia drugs may halt the progress of the deadly disease and could revolutionise its treatment, American researchers said Friday.
Both drugs have only been tested on small groups of volunteers, but were very effective in securing remission of their cancers, the teams from Minnesota and Oregon said.
The "smart bomb," so-called because they home in on cancer cells, also have minimal or no known side effects, unlike conventional chemotherapy which is highly toxic.
"The potential significance of this type of research extends beyond leukemia," said Brian Druker, a researcher at Oregon Health Sciences University.
"One of the major goals of cancer research has been to identify differences between cancer cells and normal cells so that these differences can be targetted with more effective and less toxic treatments."
The Orgeon team reported a 100 percent success rate with its experimental pill STI-571, which was used to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia.
All 31 volunteers involved in the pilot study reported a complete normalisation of their blood counts, signaling a remission of their disease.
A larger trial is planned in 2000, Drucker said.
The drug acts by inhibiting the activity of BCR-ABL, an abnormal enzyme which causes an overabundance of white blood cells, Drucker said in a statement.
In the Minnesota pilot study, doctors were able to halt the progress of lymph cancer using an experimental pill that acts in the same way.
The compound, B43-Genistein, completely wiped out the cancer cells in four out of the 10 volunteers who were in the final stages of lymph cancer, Dr Fatih Uckun of the Hughes Institute in Roseville, Minnesota said.
The volunteers in the pilot study were given just one cycle of the drug, but one of them is still free from the cancer three years on without any follow-up treatments, Uckun said.
Researchers are now testing the experimental therapy on 35 patients at centers across the United States.
"The results are encouraging. Everyone in the new study is either stable or improving," said Uckun, director of the Hughes Institute and its Parker Hughes Cancer Center.
The drug combines an antibody (B43) which allows the drug to latch on to a receptor cell (CD19) on the surface of the cancer cell with a synthetic chemical called genistein, which blocks the action of the enzyme LYN tyrosine that keeps the cells alive.
The receptor cell is present in 85 percent of lymphoid leukemia cases, -- the most common form of childhood cancer. A child dies of leukemia every 15 minutes around the globe; the disease claims 70,000 young lives every year, Uckun noted.
fullcoverage.yahoo.com
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Hughes Institute: Clinical Trial Results Offer New Hope for Patients Suffering From Leukemia
PR Newswire - December 02, 1999 14:58
Jump to first matched term
ST. PAUL, Minn., Dec. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- A new drug for treating leukemia has been tested in children and adults and has shown very promising results in the first clinical study. This new agent, B43-Genistein, was developed by scientists at the Hughes Institute. Results of this study are reported in the December issue of Clinical Cancer Research, official journal of the American Association of Cancer Research. The study was conducted at the University of Minnesota, Norris Cancer Center-University of Southern California, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Cedar Sinai Medical Center, and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Seven children and eight adults with CD19+ B-lineage acute lymphoblastic leukemia and one adult with chronic lymphocytic leukemia were treated with B43-Genistein. All patients tolerated it well with no severe side effects and three patients who relapsed after bone marrow transplantation achieved improvement or a remission. One of these patients is now alive, free of leukemia for three years. B43-Genistein inhibits the activity of LYN tyrosine kinase, an enzyme linked to several types of cancer and may provide the basis for an effective treatment strategy for patients with ALL who have failed standard therapy.
This study marks the first time a cell-type specific tyrosine kinase inhibitor has been used in leukemia patients. Leukemia is the number one disease killer of children and each year it, and related cancers, strike approximately 97,000 Americans and kill 55,000. "The most exciting feature of B43-Genistein is that it kills cancer cells at very low doses and yet at even 1,000 times higher doses it causes no detectable toxicity side effects," said Dr. Fatih Uckun, director, Hughes Institute.
News of the development of this "smart bomb" was first reported in Science, February, 1995. That study was the first to show that molecule, LYN protein tyrosine kinase, was essential for the survival of leukemia cells. Research also showed that a synthetic chemical, genistein, could block the action of the kinase. In order to get the genistein inside the cancer cells it is joined to B43, an antibody which attaches directly to CD19, a receptor found on the cancer cells. It thus attacks and instantly kills leukemia cells without harming normal cells.
References: Uckun FM, Messinger Y, Chen CL, O'Neill K, Myers DE, Goldman F, Hurvitz C, Casper JT, Levine A. Treatment of therapy-refractory B-lineage acute lymphoblastic leukemia with an apoptosis-inducing CD19-directed tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Clinical Cancer Research, 5:3906-3913, 1999.
Uckun FM, Evans WE, Forsyth CJ, Waddick KG, T-Ahlgren L, Chelstrom LM, Burkhardt A, Bolen J, Myers DE. Biotherapy of B-cell precursor leukemia by targeting genistein to CD19-associated tyrosine kinases. Science 267:886-891, 1995.
The Hughes Institute ( hughesinstitute.org ), located in Roseville, Minn., is a non-profit research organization dedicated to combating cancer, AIDS, and diseases of the immune system.
SOURCE Hughes Institute
/CONTACT: Susan Mau Larson of Hughes Institute, 651-697-9228 ext. 679,
cell 612-209-0754/ |
