Category Archives: Science

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

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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

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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

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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.

This is a preview of A new opportunity for vemurafenib in BRAFV600E colon cancer. Read the full post

miRNA as a potential biomarker for early breast cancer

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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:

  1. Imaging techniques
  2. Prognostication
  3. Diagnostics
  4. Biomarkers
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What’s hot at SABCS – Update 2 – advanced breast cancer

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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

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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

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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

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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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Gone to dog drug heaven…

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That was the quaint phrase used by one of the presenters at the recent AACR-EORTC-NCI Molecular Targets meeting in San Francisco.

Apparently, some drug or two was considered, too toxic (fair enough) or lacking in efficacy, hence the requisite binning of a multi-million dollar program to the scrapheap.

Yesterday’s post, however, reminded me that maybe sometimes, it’s not that the efficacy was lacking but the clinical trial design or tumor type or even line of therapy was the best one.  Let’s consider a couple of recent ideas here:

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Exciting new approach to targeted therapy in prostate cancer

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Last week a very interesting article appeared in Cancer Discovery that reported a new target in neuroendocrine tumours (NET) of the prostate, a particularly aggressive subtype. Now, these tumours are “rare” and “uncommon” based on a spot check with a couple of oncology specialists I asked this morning.  In fact, according to this latest research, fewer than 2% of men with prostate cancer actually present with neuroendocrine disease and adenocarcinoma of prostate can also (rarely) evolve into neuroendocrine disease, but overall, the prognosis for NET of the prostate is generally poor.

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