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Biotech / Medical : wla(warner lambert) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg Jenkins who wrote (659)	3/29/1999 6:51:00 PM
From: Captain Jack	Respond to of 942

Greg and John--- There were many "buy" and "strong buy" ratings reiterated today which made it more disappointing. With a little luck this will help us into the 70s tomorrow-- it came out about 5:15 tonight---- (REUTERS) Diabetes drug might help cancer, study shows Diabetes drug might help cancer, study shows WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - Clinical trials of the controversial diabetes drug Rezulin, credited with helping more than a million patients but also blamed for killing 28 of them, may work to slow rapid cell growth in some cancers, researchers said on Monday. A team at Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School studied three women with the rare cancer of the fat cells, liposarcoma. The women took Rezulin, known generically as troglitazone, every day for six to eight weeks. Biopsies taken of their tumors showed the rapid cell growth that usually marks cancer had slowed down, researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But their tumors did not shrink, the researchers stressed. Dr. George Demetri of Dana-Farber, who helped direct the study, said his team's previous work showed troglitazone could cause laboratory samples of liposarcoma cells to differentiate, or divide in a more normal way as opposed to the wild cell proliferation that marks cancer. "This study shows that the same results can be achieved in patients with advanced cases of liposarcoma," he said in a statement. Fat cells have a receptor, or doorway, known as PPARg, said Dana-Farber's Bruce Spiegelman. Troglitazone and similar diabetes drugs activate this receptor, causing liposarcoma cells to divide more normally. "That discovery led us to consider whether drugs that stimulate PPARg could be the basis of a new type of therapy against cancer," Spiegelman said. "The new study begins to bear out those hopes." He said other types of cancer cells, including most colon cancers and many types of breast and prostate cancers, also have PPARg receptors, so troglitazone may have an effect on them, too. Troglitazone is the first of a new class of drugs that help make the body more responsive to insulin, which helps metabolize fats and sugars. But it has been controversial because it can also damage the liver. A special committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommended last week that it be allowed to stay on the market, despite reports that 28 out of more than 1.4 million people who have taken it have died of liver disease. Troglitazone is sold by Warner-Lambert's <WLA.N> Parke-Davis division. REUTERS * end of story *