On Sat, 25 Mar 2000 GBurch1@aol.com wrote:
> There have been a couple of mentions recently of antiangiogenesis drugs.
> After the big splash a couple of years ago, things have been quiet during the
> hard work of clinical trials. Any word from the front on how those trials
> are going?
>
The primary scientist behind these (whose name I do not have unfortunately)
gave a presentation on these when he won the Infinity Award at the Dec.
A4M conference. There are more than a dozen of these in clinical
trials from most of the major pharma companies and several of them
are doing quite well. The slides he showed from his work were simply
amazing (large tumor regressions).
He explained how there was a problem initially (which is why they
went through a boom & bust cycle), that other labs had trouble
reproducing their results. That turned out to be a problem that
when they were shipping the protein out of their lab in standard
plastic tubes, CO2 could get into the tube, cause acidification
of the solution and deactivation of the protein. Those problems
have subsequently been solved. I believe that there have been
several papers in the major journals (Science, Cell, ???) on
these regarding the work his lab had done.
Interestingly enough, there are hints that if the cancer cells
are subjected to several cycles of AIs (shrink, allow to grow,
shrink, grow, etc.) that they may eliminate the micro-tumors
entirely. Perhaps this is due to sensitizing the immune system
for the cancer cells when they go in to clean up the remains
of the cells that die off due to insufficient nutrients. Alot
more study needs to be done and characterization of which
AIs inhibit which cancers (since there seems to be a family
of receptors and inhibitors involved).
Robert
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