New Pill Could Provide Hope for Patients with Advanced Cancer

Posted on September 16, 2009 in Health & Medicine, Recent Studies

A new compound, delivered by pill, may be able to shrink tumors in patients with advanced cancer. The compound affects proteins that are significant in many types of skin cancer and would be used to treat the rare cases of skin cancer that spread to internal organs rendering them inoperable. Some evidence shows that the pill may also be effective in reducing other cancers that are difficult to treat including ovarian and colorectal cancers.

The pill was developed by Roche’s Genentech, and tested on 33 patients. More than half of the patients showed some improvement, and in the 18 patients with advanced cancer that had metastasized to the organs, 15 saw a 30% reduction in the size of the tumors. These results were promising enough to move on to further tests.

The most significant obstacle appears to be that the results are short-lived. After a period of time the cancer develops a mutation that is resistant to the compound and the tumors begin to grow again.

However researchers from Genentech and Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center remain optimistic that they will be able to find a way to prevent the mutations from reducing the effectiveness of the drug. They believe that the compound could provide hope for cancer patients who are not treatable by any of the current methods.