New from SUGEN:
Reuters
Pharmacia cancer drug looks good in early study
Wednesday November 20, 10:45 am ET
FRANKFURT, Nov 20 (Reuters) - A new drug that starves tumours of blood supply has proven unexpectedly effective in early human studies, shrinking tumoUrs by half in 25 percent of patients who were given it, researchers reported said Wednesday.
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A team led by Dr Eric Raymond from France's biggest cancer centre, Institut Gustave Roussy in Villejuif, tested the drug from Sugen, a unit of Pharmacia Corp (NYSE:PHA - News), in people with a range of cancers that were unresponsive to standard treatment.
"Any activity in this situation is very promising since everything else has failed. But we did not expect to see such a high number of responses in a range of cancers," Raymond told reporters at a cancer therapy meeting here.
The researchers first thought the drug, codenamed SU011248, would only stabilise the size of the tumours, rather than shrinking them.
SU011248 is a signal transduction inhibitor acting against several enzymes involved in angiogenesis, or new blood vessel growth.
In the Phase I study, 25 patients were given SU011248 orally for four weeks. In six of the of 23 patients who could be evaluated -- roughly one in four -- tumours shrank by 50 percent or more.
Preventing the growth of blood vessels to cancers, or angiogenesis, has been a big field of cancer research for years, but the concept has not lived up to its early promise. Researchers think this drug may work where others have failed because it targets several of the cancer's defences at once. |
