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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Is ARN-509 (Aragon) potentially better than MDV-3100 (Medivation) in advanced prostate cancer?

Posted on February 2, 2012 by MaverickNY

Many readers will have noticed that the advanced prostate cancer market is rapidly becoming crowded with three new therapies (cabazitaxel, sipuleucel-T and abiraterone) already approved and several more in late stage development, including Alpharadin (radium-223) and MDV3100, both likely to file this year. In addition, others are focused on bone complications, such as denosumab, which is expected to have a tough ODAC meeting this month, and cabozantinib, a multikinase inhibitor currently in phase III trials.

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On KRAS, NF-kB activation and pancreatic cancer

Posted on January 31, 2012 by MaverickNY

Pancreatic cancer as many readers know, is one of those cancers that is generally diagnosed later than most in stage IV and as a result, has a poor prognosis, often only a year or so from diagnosis.

It has been known for a decade that constitutive Kras and NF-kB activation is one of the signature changes in the disease in the majority (80-95% ) of patients. Kras is a particularly important gene because it is often involved with on-off signaling of other genes. In addition, mutational inactivation of a key tumour suppressor gene (Ink4a/Arf) also occurs in over half (50-75%) of pancreatic adenocarcinomas. What is not known, however, is what are the key signaling pathways downstream of Kras and how they relate to pancreatic cancer.

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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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miRNA as a potential biomarker for early breast cancer

Posted on January 16, 2012 by MaverickNY

One way to potentially improve long term cancer statistics is earlier detection, and in high risk patients, appropriate initiation of earlier treatment, since it is well known that the survival in stage II or III breast cancer is noticeably better than that for stage IV metastatic disease.

A critical question then, is how do we improve earlier detection?

There are a number of ways to achieve this:

Imaging techniques
Prognostication
Diagnostics
Biomarkers

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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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What's hot at SABCS – Update 1

Posted on December 8, 2011 by MaverickNY

Yesterday evening brought a flurry of news around the New England Journal of Medicine articles for the BOLERO2 and CLEOPATRA trials, but out of respect to the presenters, I hate talking about the actual data before its being presented. Call me old fashioned if you like, but it seems odd moving up deadlines for the publication ahead of the presentations instead of releasing them on the day and is a little disrespectful of the journal towards the presenter and attendees.

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Video preview of San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium 2011

Posted on December 7, 2011 by MaverickNY

What’s hot at the 2011 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium?

There is a lot of exciting data coming out at SABCS 2011 over the next three days, including the BOLERO2, CLEOPATRA and NEOSPHERE clinical trial data.

I previously wrote about the exciting BOLERO2 results that were presented at the European Multidisciplinary Cancer Conference (ECCO/ESMO 2011) in Stockholm in September. More data is expected at SABCS to coincide with a publication in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

The following video outlines some of the data that I think is hot at SABCS and why it’s worth watching out for. I will be writing more about it as it’s presented.

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EGFR activates mTORC2 in glioblastoma – a potential role for new therapies

Posted on December 1, 2011 by MaverickNY

One of the great things about following the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) on Twitter, is that they regularly share technical open access articles from their journals for scientists to read. Of course, many will have access through their institution subscription, but there are also probably quite a few interested community oncologists and scientists like me that don’t. The idea of sharing some of their really important scientific research with the broader public is a great one – a little bit of goodwill goes a long way and furthers their cause too.

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