Category Archives: Basic Research

Reflections of a Medical Oncologist on AACR 2012

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While thoughts have already turned to the forthcoming ASCO 2012 meeting and today I am off to AUA 2012 in Atlanta, the annual meeting of the American Association Association for Cancer Research (AACR) last month continues to generate insights.

At AACR I was delighted to meet up with Philippe Aftimos, MD, a Clinical Research Fellow at the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels, Belgium.   Philippe is medical coordinator of the Clinical Research Unit and someone who I met through social media (@aftimosp), so it was a pleasure to meet in person.

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Ribonucleases (RNase) – clinical applications for cancer therapy

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This is the second post of a two-part mini series on RNases with Dr Laura Strong of Quintessence Biosciences.  If you haven’t yet read it, check out yesterday’s post, which focused on Ribonucleases (RNase) – what are they and why are they relevant to cancer?

Yesterday, we learned that RNases kill cancer cells by a novel mechanism – destruction of RNA – and may be synergistic with some chemotherapy agents.

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Ribonucleases (RNase) what are they and why are they relevant to cancer?

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At the recent American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting, I had the pleasure of meeting several interesting young scientists and physicians either in the poster halls or in various scientific sessions.  It seemed a great idea to encourage some of them to contribute some guess blog posts here on PSB.

AACR 2012 Laura Strong Poster 300x176 Ribonucleases (RNase) what are they and why are they relevant to cancer?

Dr Laura Strong, Photo courtesy of Pieter Droppert, Biotech Strategy Blog

Amongst the people I met was Dr Laura Strong, President and COO of Quintessence Biosciences.

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Highlights of AACR 2012 – Part 2

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Yesterday, I mentioned that some of the best bits of this year’s American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting were the numerous gems in the poster sessions.

Reuben Sierra AACR e1334766105891 224x300 Highlights of AACR 2012 Part 2

Reuben Sierra, Ming Tsao's Lab (with permission)

One of the coolest such posters I came across was from Ming Tsao’s group.

Specifically, Rafael Sierra (see photo right) was hosting an excellent piece of research entitled: “Overcoming resistance to EGFR-tyrosine kinase inhibitor therapy in non-small cell lung cancer.”

This is an area of much needed research and breakthroughs.

Why?

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Highlights of AACR 2012 – Part 1

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The 2012 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Chicago was interesting for several reasons.  While there were no truly ground breaking data such as in previous years as with, for example:

  • vemurafenib in BRAFV600E melanoma
  • vismodegib in basal cell carcinoma (BCC)
  • crizotinib in ALK+ lung cancer

there were a lot of encouraging signs for the future.

What made the meeting exciting for me was the sheer number of new compounds emerging from late preclinical to early phase I – clearly companies are looking to restock their pipelines with the threat of major patent cliffs imminent.  Not everyone is chasing new compounds to license in!  The sheer breadth and depth of the pathways targeted by the new compounds took me a little by surprise.

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American Association for Cancer Research Meeting 2012

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Today marks the kick off for one of my favourite conferences on the oncology-hematology calendar, with the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) being held in Chicago.  It’s all about the science and basic research here, although there are clinical sessions, usually on strategy and early emerging phase I/II data.

Wifi is usually pretty good at the AACR annual meeting, although it can be more variable at the smaller meetings.  Like many attendees, wifi permitting, I’ll be tweeting from the conference and blogging some of the interesting highlights over the next few days.

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The importance of metabolism in cancer research

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Cancer metabolism is fast becoming an area to watch out for in R&D.  Last month I tweeted that I was attending a one day meeting at NY Academy of Sciences on Cancer Metabolism with keynote speakers Drs Lou Cantley and Craig Thompson. Jonathan Mandelbaum (@biotechbaumer) responded saying it looked like a dress rehearsal of another related meeting he was attending the following week. That was too good an opportunity to miss, so I invited Jonathan to consider guest posting a summary of the Keystone event he attended here on Pharma Strategy. I’m delighted to say he kindly took me up on the offer and what follows is Jonathan’s synopsis, including some references he chose to illustrate the key points, most of which are open access.

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nab-Paclitaxel and its potential role in pancreatic cancer

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Back in 2009 at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Molecular Targets meeting, a researcher (Anirban Maitra) from Boston had a most interesting poster about the use of nanotechnology to deliver nab-paclitaxel (Abraxane) to pancreatic adenocarcinomas in a more targeted fashion.  You can read about it in more detail from the meeting coverage at that time.

Essentially, one of the things that stops chemotherapy being more effective in advanced pancreatic cancer is that the stromal layer forms a physical, almost impenetrable layer, that slows drugs from getting through to the tumour.

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We the People…

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I don’t do this very often, but here’s a worthy cause for scientists and cancer researchers to rally around – Dr Steven Meltzer at Johns Hopkins established an online petition to the White House to increase funding to the NIH – the current proposal is to maintain the budget at a flat $30.7 billion.

Supporting the petition taught me something interesting – NIH funding created 350,000 jobs and contributed $50 Billion to the national economy in 2007 alone.

The problem, though, with flat budgets is that every 7 years the value of money halves, so the NIH budget has essentially been decimated over the last decade. This is sad for science, for progress and also for patients.

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Will combining custirsen and MDV3100 reduce resistance in advanced prostate cancer?

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EAU 2012 View of Eiffel Tower 224x300 Will combining custirsen and MDV3100 reduce resistance in advanced prostate cancer?

Sights of 2012 EAU Congress

Greetings from the European Association of Urology (EAU) congress in Paris. Despite the grey drizzle typical of Europe in winter, this is actually quite an interesting meeting with lots of poster presentations.

One poster that caught my eye yesterday was from Martin Gleave’s group on clusterin knockdown synergising MDV3100 activity. Previously, we discussed on this blog how inhibiting clusterin with custirsen (OGX-011) potentiated docetaxel. At the AUA meeting last year, the issue of whether the same would happen with MDV3100 was suggested, as you can see in the short video blog.

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