Living in Shade

Our medical industry in this country is constantly searching for new ways to combat diseases. Medicine and pharmaceuticals after all is big business and while a lot of this is motivated by money, its still nice when new advances are found in our attempt to stamp out disease. One of the biggest ones out there right now is cancer. There’s a lot of money to be made in fighting cancer, and thus there’s a lot of research being done for it.

Recently a new experimental drug designed by Roche Holding AG’s Genentech unit, has gone through an initial testing phase and produced some remarkable results. This drug attempts to attack the so called hedgehog pathway which is instrumental in the development of some cancers. An article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Roche Drug Shrinks Tumors” details what we have learned from this initial trial.

In a small study the drug, known for now as GDC-0449, was found to have shrunk tumors in 18 out of 33 patients suffering from basal cell carcinoma. That’s a 55% success rate which is remarkably high for an early stage cancer trial and has researchers very optimistic.

The drug also had a dramatic, though temporary, effect on a patient suffering from a form of brain cancer known as medulloblastoma.

“This defines a new pathway that may have efficacy for multiple tumor types,” said Charles M. Rudin, associate director for clinical research at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, and a co-author of two reports on the drug that are being published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

While still in its infancy, the results are certainly encouraging.

“The studies are preliminary, and we don’t know in the long term how useful this class of drugs will be,” said Andrzej A. Dlugosz, a researcher at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, Ann Arbor, and co-author of an editorial that accompanied publication of the findings. Still, he said, “hopes are big” that the responses seen in the trial hold promise for “this being a new approach” to cancer treatment.

Basal cell carcinoma is the most common form of skin cancer and affects about 1 million Americans a year. Most cases are easily treatable with surgery, although it does spread in some cases and prognosis in those instances is poor. This type was chosen for the study because about 90% of basal cell carcinoma cases are driven by a mutation in the hedgehog pathway.

All in all this has to be seen as great news and it looks like the outlook for the drug is good. Based on these encouraging results, the company is hopeful that they will be able to push for FDA approval soon. What’s especially important about this drug is that it could be the start of a whole new direction in cancer drug development. No drug before has taken this particular route in attacking cancer. Successful research here can only spawn newer and better things for the future of cancer research.