New cancer treatment offers early 'promising results'

Published on Thursday 25 June 2009 00:13

SCIENTISTS yesterday said early trials of a new type of cancer treatment have shown "promising results".

Patients with inherited forms of advanced breast, ovarian and prostate cancers – caused by mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes – were treated with new drug olaparib.

Despite having previously unsuccessfully received many standard treatments for their cancer, in more than half of the patients tumours shrank or stabilised.

The researchers revealed that one of the first patients to be given the treatment is still in remission after two years.

The Phase 1 research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was carried out at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and the Royal Marsden Hospital, working with pharmaceutical company Astra-Zeneca.

Olaparib targets cancerous cells but leaves healthy ones relatively unscathed. This means patients experience few side-effects and some reported that the treatment was "much easier than chemotherapy".

Dr Johann de Bono, one of the scientists who led the trial, said the positive results confirmed that olaparib should be taken into larger patient trials.

"This drug showed very impressive results in shrinking patients' tumours," he said.

"It's giving patients who have already tried many conventional treatments long periods of remission, free from the symptoms of cancer or major side- effects."

Olaparib is the first successful example of a new type of personalised medicine using "synthetic lethality", in which the treatment works in combination with a patient's specific molecular defect.