Biotechnology drugs showing some success at treating cancer
Published: June 20, 2005
New biotechnology drugs are showing success at treating cancer. But there still aren’t many of them, and their successes are frequently measured in the smallest steps.
That was the essential message Sunday from biotech company officials addressing an opening session of BIO 2005 at the Philadelphia Convention Center. The four-day convention officially opens Monday morning and is expected to attract about 18,000 biotechnology industry executives, financiers, and others to Philadelphia.
At a media brunch featuring cancer-fighting foods - such as spinach, chili peppers and raspberries - the executives described research focusing on developing drugs that utilize the body’s own cellular processes to halt cancer growth.
Results have been promising, yet success rates low. One executive, Donald L. Drakeman of Medarex Inc. in Princeton, N.J., described the company’s work with an experimental drug called MDX-010 - currently in late-stage human clinical trials.
The drug is an antibody designed to help patients with advanced and deadly melanoma fight off their disease with a stronger immune response. Some patients have shown dramatic results with the drug - six had their cancers disappear or shrink significantly. Yet that was out of a group of 29 patients receiving a higher dose of the drug.
Still, Drakeman noted, chemotherapy for such patients usually works only 5 percent of the time - and for just six weeks. One patient receiving MDX-010, with cancer that had spread to the lungs and brain, has lived nearly 30 months, “and that’s what’s getting us excited,” Drakeman said.
Another biotech executive, Stephen Sherwin, CEO of Cell Genesys Inc. in San Francisco, described the company’s development of its GVAX anticancer vaccines, also designed to stimulate the body’s own immune system. In one clinical trial, he said, cancer patients receiving GVAX had experienced a median survival rate of 26 months. Yet that was just seven or eight months longer than patients receiving standard chemotherapy.
Years of research and development have produced just 29 biotech cancer drugs. Cancer is almost always treated with a combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
A problem, said Sherwin, is that “the investment community is not really interested in investing in new therapies (in the development stage) because they don’t know if they’ll succeed.”
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Bioinformatics for DummiesYet, as meeting moderator Carl H. June of the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center observed, biotech leaders are confident their biologic drugs will someday overtake standard chemo treatments. “There’s going to be a flood of things” in the pipeline, he said. “Unfortunately, it takes longer than we’d like.”
Brunch participants also learned about the human side of cancer from a Hollywood and television star whose breast cancer was diagnosed in 1993.
That star is a man, actor Richard Roundtree, famous for his movie role as John Shaft in 1971 and most recently appearing in television’s “Desperate Housewives.”
His advice on fighting cancer: Be alert to symptoms and get an early diagnosis, eat healthy foods and exercise.
“There are points in our lives where we’re given another chance. I was,” said Roundtree, who has been a breast cancer survivor for 12 years.
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