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Biotech / Medical : Supergen (supg) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Larry Liebman who wrote (99)	11/15/1999 12:41:00 AM
From: sim1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 124

The Next Taxol? businessweek.com Supergen, a small pharmaceutical company in San Ramon, Calif., is in the final stages of testing a powerful new drug called rubitecan for pancreatic cancer, a disease that currently has no effective treatment. So potent is the drug that physicians are already calling it the next Taxol, a cancer drug with more than $1 billion in worldwide sales annually. About 600 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, which kills 30,000 Americans annually, are being treated with rubitecan. Early studies show that the drug, which can be taken orally, has few side-effects and appears to work against the most aggressive tumors. Even patients who failed to respond to radiation began improving once they started on rubitecan. In one trial, for instance, doctors found that the pancreatic tumors of two-thirds of the patients shrank or ceased to grow after just eight weeks on the drug. The active ingredient in rubitecan belongs to a class of drugs first isolated from a Chinese flowering tree called Camptotheca acuminata. These so-called camptothecins inhibit a key enzyme required for cell division. Because cancer cells grow and divide so rapidly, they are much more sensitive to camptothecins than normal cells. SuperGen is now testing to see if rubitecan is effective in killing other cancers, including those of the lung and breast. The company hopes to begin marketing the drug sometime in 2001.