Help For Deadly Melanoma?

A small clinical trial of an experimental drug has even battle-hardened melanoma experts excited.

Almost nothing works against melanoma once it spreads beyond the skin. Chemotherapy and other treatments only shrink tumors in 10 to 15 percent of cases.

Numerous experimental drugs have bombed in trials, including drugs from Synta Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer .

That is why melanoma doctors at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Orlando, Fla., are buzzing about a preliminary trial of a new drug from Roche and privately-held Plexxikon that targets a crucial gene mutation found in about half of melanomas.

In the trial, which included 55 patients, tumors dramatically shrank in 9 of 16 very advanced patients with the gene mutation who got high doses--a better response rate than doctors have remembered seeing in a trial for advanced melanoma. Patients in the trial so far lived about six months without their tumors progressing, versus two months typically seen for such patients.

"It is what we have been waiting for to see in melanoma for years," says University of California, Los Angeles, melanoma expert Antoni Ribas, who is involved in the trial. He calls the response rates "unprecedented." University of Pennsylvania melanoma expert Keith Flaherty, who led the trial, said the high rate of responses is somewhat reminiscent of the first trials of Gleevec, Novartis' breakthrough leukemia drug. "The excitement level is very high," he says. One melanoma patient who had tumors clogging her lungs was able to go off oxygen within weeks of starting on the drug.

Only far larger trials will reveal whether the drug actually helps patients live longer. Melanoma is a far more aggressive disease than leukemia, and some of the patients have already relapsed after just a few months. Still, doctors are hopeful that the drug may help a larger percentage of patients live with their disease for longer than is possible today. Advanced melanoma grows like wildfire and typically kills patients within a year.

The drug is an early example of a wave of super-targeted cancer drugs winding their way through early human trials. The new drugs target very specific subsets of patients with the disease and will come with gene tests to pluck out which patients are likely to respond.

Source : www.forbes.com