Cancer Clinical Trials: Companion Diagnostics or Gene Sequencing?

Posted on February 21, 2012 by MaverickNY

Last year saw some interesting developments from MD Anderson Cancer Center in early phase clinical trials that may have a far-reaching impact on the future of cancer research as we know it:

At ASCO in June, Dr Tsimberidou presented the initial results from a phase I study run by the MD Anderson Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics group. Instead of testing patients with a given cancer (eg lung) for individual mutations eg ALK or EGFR and then offering patients a targted drug as we normally do, they ran a broad diagnostic panel across a multitude of patients with different cancers to determine what the tumour was telling them about the aberrations and selected appropriate targeted therapies. While the study was small in size, the results were better than random selection.

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Raised platelets reduce survival in ovarian cancer

Posted on February 15, 2012 by MaverickNY

During my years in Pharmaland, I often sat in waiting rooms waiting to see the Principal Investigator (PI) for one of the studies we were doing. I would generally see them at the end of the clinic, preferring to arrive early and chat with some of the patients to learn of their experiences, the trials and tribulations of cancer therapy. This keeps your feet on the ground – drug development is not an academic exercise, there are real people involved after all.

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The role of the Androgen Receptor in breast cancer

Posted on February 10, 2012 by MaverickNY

This week I have been in Orlando for the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Special Conference on prostate cancer chaired by Drs Arul Chinnaiyan (U. of Michigan) and Charles Sawyers (MSKCC). It was a superb meeting, probably one of the best I’ve attended since the PI3K meeting that AACR hosted in February last year. I wrote nearly half a Moleskine of notes that vaguely resemble chicken scratch – there were so many good talks that stimulated new ideas and explained a few scientific things I also didn’t know too well. Learning is a continuous lifetime experience, after all.

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Update on Medivation’s MDV3100 in advanced prostate cancer

Posted on January 31, 2012 by MaverickNY

This weekend heralds the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Genitourinary (GU) meeting in San Francisco, although ASCO held their press briefing today to provide an update on some of the key topics.

For those of you interested in Alpharadin (radium-225) in castrate-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), check out the update of Dr Oliver Sartor’s presentation, which is covered on Biotech Strategy Blog.

The key topic that most interested me though, was Dr Howard Scher’s update on Medivation’s Androgen Receptor antagonist, MDV3100, in CRPC. Previously, Medivation announced that the data showed an improvement in median overall survival (OS) of 4.8 months and this is still solid (Note: J&J’s abiraterone was approved by the FDA based on an OS of 3.9 months in the same population and must be taken with prednisone).

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A new opportunity for vemurafenib in BRAFV600E colon cancer

Posted on January 26, 2012 by MaverickNY

There’s been quite a flurry of commercial news on the Pharma front this morning, with Amgen buying Micromet (whose leading product is blinatumumab in ALL) and Celgene announcing their acquisition of Avila Therapeutics who have a Bruton Kinase Inhibitor (BTK) AVL-292 in phase IB development for lymphomas, which was all the rage at the recent American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting last month.

The big news for me today, though, wasn’t the commercial acquisitions but a gem of a paper relating to science and its significance for future cancer treatment.

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Gene mutation and resistance to chemotherapy in colorectal cancer

Posted on January 5, 2012 by MaverickNY

This week’s New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) contained a fascinating article on how a specific gene mutation known as Transcription factor AP-2 epsilon, TFAP2E–DKK4, appears to be responsible for inducing at least some of the resistance to chemotherapy that occurs during treatment of colon cancer.

At first sight, I wasn’t sure from the abstract if they were referring to either adaptive resistance to therapy or whether genetic changes already present limited the effectivenes of the treatment.

Further reading of the full article more specifically pointed to the latter:

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ASH 2011 Update #2 – Non Hodgkins Lymphoma

Posted on December 21, 2011 by MaverickNY

I’ve been busy with other things offline since the last blog update from the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting in San Diego, but will be catching up on my notes from the conference over the next few days.

In addition, my colleague Pieter Droppert has already posted his topline impressions of the meeting on the companion Biotech Strategy Blog, which readers may be interested in:

Meanwhile, I thought it would be a good idea to look at the pipeline developments in non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas (NHL) that I particulalry liked at ASH:

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ASH 2011 Update 1: Bruton's Kinase Inhibitors (BTK)

Posted on December 15, 2011 by MaverickNY

This year’s American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting heralded a wealth of new information on pipeline compounds in early development. Although a lot of people were excited about myelofibrosis and the battle between Incyte’s ruxolitinib and YM Bioscience’s CYT387 (more on these in a separate update), the area that intrigued me most was the Bruton’s Tyrosine Kinase (BTK) inhibitors in B-cell lymphomas.

Background on the science behind the BTK pathway:

I’ve been following these novel agents for a while and was fascinated by two abstracts from the ASCO and ASH meetings last year. It became clear that BTK is a valid target in B-cell lymphomas after Advani et al., (2010) demonstrated at ASCO the effect of BTK inhibitor PCI-32765 monotherapy on responses in patients with relapsed aggressive NHL.1

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What’s hot at SABCS – Update 2 – advanced breast cancer

Posted on December 10, 2011 by MaverickNY

After a number of basic research and science sessions over the last two days (see the Update 1 post on the science that intrigued me for more details), but the last two days heralded some excellent clinical sessions, in both oral and poster forms. These included the presentation of the much anticipated update to the BOLERO-2 trial, which was also published in the New England Journal of Medicine online and the CLEOPATRA study, also published in the same journal. One of the more impressive posters that caught my eye was the ENCORE 301 study, which provided an update to the entinostat data in ER/PR+ HER2- advanced breast cancer.

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Follow the American Society of Hematology ASH conversations!

Posted on December 10, 2011 by MaverickNY

It doesn’t seem a full year since the last American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting took place, time has certainly flown by!

For those interested, I posted a review what I think will be hot topics at this meeting

In the meantime, to enable easy reading of the tweets and discussions here in San Diego for those both attending and following remotely, I’m aggregating the tweets around the official hashtag, #ASH11.

You can follow the conversations over the weekend through Tuesday in the widget below:

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