thanks texas.. the following seems relevant to LGND but i'd like to hear some comments...
Millennium Discovers Markers Associated With Chemotherapy Response in Breast Cancer Patients
Wednesday December 11, 2:00 pm ET
-- Discovery to be Presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Conference --
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: MLNM - News) today announced results from a preliminary, prospective study seeking to identify novel genetic predictors of breast cancer patients' response to chemotherapy. Findings from the study demonstrated that a five-gene marker set predicted, with 81% accuracy, a complete response to treatment with neo-adjuvant TAXOL® (paclitaxel) Injection plus 5-Fluorouracil, Doxorubicin, Cyclophosphamide (FAC) chemotherapy in patients with locally advanced breast cancer. The results were announced today at the 25th annual meeting of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in San Antonio, Tex.
(Photo: newscom.com )
"This discovery is a significant first step towards a goal of personalizing the care we provide to our patients, potentially allowing for more effective care, and ultimately, significantly better outcomes," said Lajos Pusztai, M.D., Ph.D, assistant professor in the Department of Breast Medical Oncology, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, lead investigator of the study. "If the medical community could one day predict individual patient outcome, we could then tailor our therapeutic strategies accordingly, selectively administering chemotherapy regimens to patients who are most likely to benefit most from these drugs and sparing others from the toxicity."
"This is truly an exciting discovery since there are currently no universally accepted molecular predictors of response to cytotoxic chemotherapies for breast cancer," said Geoff Ginsburg, M.D., Ph.D., vice president, molecular medicine, Millennium. "While the majority of breast cancer patients are treated with chemotherapy, this is applied empirically despite the observation that not all regimens are equally effective for everyone, and may incur toxic side-effects. Our ultimate goal is to discover predictors of response to identify those patients who will be best served by current therapies and enable us to focus on novel therapies to serve the remaining patient population whose needs are not currently being met."
"In this context, the results of this study will allow us to design better clinical trials and evaluate future pharmacogenomic strategies for our oncology products through a better understanding of response to current therapies," said Dr. Ginsburg.
The preliminary study, conducted at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, included 45 patients with advanced, inoperable breast cancer. Using cDNA microarray technology to identify markers, the investigators analyzed patient tumor and blood samples, studying genetic markers specific to tumor cells for their association with the tumor's response to treatment.
Future studies will be aimed at validating the marker set and identifying molecular predictors for other therapeutic combinations, with the eventual goal of developing tailored diagnostics and therapeutics to serve patients with breast cancer.
About Breast Cancer
According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer is the most common form of cancer among women with about 203,500 new cases of invasive breast cancer (Stages I-IV) diagnosed in the United States this year. Breast cancer also occurs in men with an estimated 1,500 newly diagnosed cases. There will be an estimated 40,000 deaths from breast cancer this year. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death in women surpassed only by lung cancer.
About Personalized Medicine at Millennium
Millennium is committed to delivering the next generation of breakthrough therapeutic products that redefine disease and treatment paradigms using our personalized medicine strategy. The Company's goal is to characterize diseases and their treatments at the molecular level leveraging our deep understanding of mechanisms and pathways of disease. To further the Company's personalized medicine strategy, Millennium is conducting detailed studies of gene expression patterns, molecular pathways and genetic differences in human studies to identify appropriate biomarkers for use in conjunction with its drug development programs. Currently, the Company is operating personalized medicine programs for a majority of its programs in clinical development ranging across the indications covered by all four franchise areas. Through its focus on personalized medicine, the Company hopes to better understand the molecular underpinnings of disease in order to more effectively design therapeutic treatments and diagnostic products, manage clinical trials with greater productivity, and deliver novel products that significantly improve patient outcomes.
About Millennium
Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a leading biopharmaceutical company, co- promotes INTEGRILIN® (eptifibatide) Injection, a market-leading cardiovascular product, and has a robust clinical development pipeline of product candidates. The Company's research, development and commercialization activities are focused in four disease areas: cardiovascular, oncology, inflammation and metabolic. By applying its knowledge of the human genome, its understanding of disease mechanisms, and its industrialized technology platform, Millennium is developing breakthrough personalized medicine products. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. Millennium also has facilities in South San Francisco, Calif. and Cambridge, UK.
TAXOL® (paclitaxel) Injection is a trademark of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. |
