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To: Sam Nizam who wrote (68904)	4/14/1999 7:34:00 PM
From: Paul Berliner	Respond to of 119973

ONXX - ONYX Pharm. + 3 - a gapper tomorrow on postive mentions of cancer drug. By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent PHILADELPHIA, April 14 (Reuters) - A virus that has been genetically engineered to home in on cancer cells and destroy them may have even broader action than its developers hoped, scientists said on Wednesday. They said the virus, Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s <ONXX.O> ONYX-015, has had a remarkable effect in treating patients with advanced head and neck cancer. And while such results in patients are still at very early stages, some basic research indicates the drug could work on many, if not most, kinds of cancer, they told a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). "This is a remarkable finding and extremely encouraging," Dr. Waun Ki Hong, a head and neck cancer specialist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and program director for the meeting, told a news conference. In a Phase II trial, during which a drug is tested for safety, 26 patients with advanced and untreatable head and neck cancer had ONYX-015 injected directly into their tumors. Overall, 60 percent of the patients responded. Four saw their tumors disappear completely -- something that almost never happens in patients with such advanced disease on whom surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy has failed. The other 12 had a partial response, meaning their tumors shrank by at least half. Usually, Hong said, only about 30 percent of patients with such advanced head and neck cancers respond. "The first surprise is that the effect is more dramatic in humans than in mice," said Frank McCormick, director of the cancer research institute at the University of California San Francisco, who developed ONYX-015. Further experiments show the drug may work in a broader range of cancer patients, he told the AACR. ONYX-015 is an adenovirus, a relative of common cold viruses, that has been genetically engineered. Many cancer cells, about 60 percent, have damage to a gene called p53, which, when it works normally, repairs faulty DNA. One of the steps adenoviruses use to invade cells is to neutralize the p53 damage repair gene. So McCormick genetically engineered his cold virus so it could not disable this gene and therefore should not be able to invade healthy cells. But cancerous cells, with their p53 gene inactivated anyway, would be perfect hosts for the virus. McCormick is not sure why the virus kills cancer cells, but he thinks the body's immune system reacts to the cold virus, and attacks not only the virus but also any cancer cells that it has infected. Then it starts in on uninfected cancer cells. Standard cancer treatments make cells even more susceptible to the immune system, so the effect is even stronger. The virus should work in the 60 percent of cancer cells that have p53 mutations. But McCormick said his team found the virus works in an even higher percentage of cancer cells -- in fact, virtually all of the ones he tested it on. "We and many others found cells that still retain p53 intact are still killed by the ONYX-015 virus," he said. Late last year, researchers found that in most cancers, even if p53 is not damaged, the mechanism that controls p53, known as the pathway, is. So p53 is inactivated in those canumor cells and seeing if it really does stop the virus from growing," he said. REUTERS //Begin Meta Data// Selector Code: reutr Copyright 1999, Reuters News Service