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Health and medicine

Cancer success gives broad hope

PARIS - A new drug has been shown to dramatically delay the progression of a rare type of intestinal cancer in patients who have run out of options because their tumors have outsmarted even the latest high-tech drug.

Sutent belongs to a new class of cancer drugs that target multiple tumor activities at once. Doctors are hopeful it will usher in a new era of combinations of finely targeted drugs that can greatly improve the prognosis of patients.

Conventional chemotherapy drugs kill cancer cells, but they also damage healthy tissue. The newer generation of drugs specifically target tumor cells and leave the rest of the body alone. However, they hone in on a single tumor function, don't work for everybody and can stop working after a while.

Sutent, or sunitinib malate, seems to shrink tumors by simultaneously starving them of blood, blocking signals that tell them to grow and spread, and causing cancer cells to die. It has shown promise in previous studies in kidney and breast cancer patients. It is one of more than 10 multitasking drugs being studied.

The research, presented Thursday at the European Cancer Conference in Paris, studied Sutent in 312 people in Europe, the United States, Australia and Asia with a type of cancer called gastrointestinal stromal tumor, or GIST.

Sutent delayed the time to progression of the tumor from 6.4 weeks to 27.3 weeks, the study found. It is too early to tell whether the treatment is saving lives.

The study was paid for by Sutent's developer, Pfizer.

Experts agree the promise of Sutent and other such drugs goes beyond GIST, which is being used as a proving ground for other cancers because scientists understand its simple circuitry.

The study's leader, Dr. George Demetri of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said the findings will help scientists think more creatively about more complicated cancers.

"We are trying to put together the rule book on cancer," he said.

[Last modified November 4, 2005, 01:42:07]