A once-a-day pill significantly shrank tumors in men with advanced prostate cancer who had not responded to other treatments, researchers said on Tuesday.
Cougar Biotechnology Inc’s drug abiraterone delayed a worsening of the disease by a median of 400 days, according to the Phase I clinical trial results published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
“We are highly confident this drug is highly active and durable,” Johan de Bono, the researcher at Britain’s Institute of Cancer Research who led the study, said in an interview. “We believe this drug will make a difference.”
Prostate cancer is the second-leading cancer killer of men after lung cancer. Each year, 680,000 men worldwide are diagnosed with the disease and about 220,000 will die from it.
All the volunteers in the study had an aggressive form of prostate cancer in which some researchers believe the tumor tissue is able to produce its own supply of the hormones that fuel the disease.
“This drug prevents the cancer from making its own hormones that allow the cancer cells to survive,” de Bono said.
The drug targets an enzyme called CYP17, which plays a key role in this process, he said.
RESOURCE/SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25793437/ on Tuesday,July 22,2008.
