Hardy. Pancreatic cancer often thwarts drugs, including one by Amgen that just failed.
Wikimedia / KGH
The failure of treatment of pancreatic cancer, announced Wednesday by its manufacturer Amgen, is yet another sign that a class once promising treatments against cancer failed to meet expectations. The latest flop treatment called ganitumab, is a monoclonal antibody that targets the factor 1 receptor-like growth to insulin (IGF-1R), type. At Amgen, the drug all the way to a clinical Phase III trial before the company pulled the halfway taken through the trial after finding that the therapy was unlikely to help patients live longer .
IGF-1R has been considered a promising target after researchers have made a number of interesting observations. are linked to a slightly increased risk of cancer circulating levels of IGF-1 hormone in the blood of a person. The receiver is often expressed on epithelial cells, the type of cells that become cancerous, and it promotes cell survival. Finally, in cell cultures and animals overexpressing the hormone might produce something that looks like a cancer, and it would shrink when treated with an inhibitor of IGF-1R.
But in patients, drugs are "a series of failure," says Vuk Stambolic, a cancer researcher at Princess Margaret Hospital and Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto, Canada. Other trials of this drug target in lung cancer did not work, and the effects of these drugs in colorectal cancer are also doubtful, said Stambolic.
the Achilles heel for many potential cancer drugs is biology. in short, it usually turns out to be more complicated than first thought. it may not be enough to go after only IGF-1R, and patients in these trials have very advanced disease and may be less likely to meet very targeted treatments. the work of animals and cells as real life can not fully emulate. "I think the model is probably only partially representative of what happens in cancer," said Stambolic.
Various companies are also testing a class of drugs that target both IGF-1R and the insulin receptor. The hope is that the double whammy will be more damaging to the tumor.
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