The three pharmaceutical giants announced a plan to create a not-for-profit company in Singapore that will help speed up research on new medicines to treat gastric and lung cancers, which have become prevalent in Asia.

the Asian Cancer Research Group

The company, which will be called the Asian Cancer Research Group, is one of the first examples of a collaboration among major drug companies to combine resources and expertise to rapidly increase the knowledge of a disease and the disease process.

Merck is headquartered in Readington, Pfizer in New York and Eli Lilly in Indianapolis.

Over the next two years, the three companies will work on creating an extensive pharmacogenomic cancer database. The database will consist of information taken from about 2,000 tissue samples from patients with lung and gastric cancer and will be made available to researchers around the world.

The data will be housed and shared with scientists at the Lilly Singapore Center, Eli Lilly’s drug research facility.

“Through its work and the subsequent sharing of information, the information, the Asian Cancer Research Group hopes to empower researchers, foster innovation and improve the prognosis and treatment of patients with cancer,’’ said Gary Gilliand, senior vice president and franchise head, oncology, Merck Research Laboratories.

Sage Bionetworks

The creation of the research group was inspired by the non-profit Seattle-based Sage Bionetworks, which was founded by Stephen Friend, who previously headed Merck’s cancer research efforts.

Tamoxifen is given to most women diagnosed with breast cancer to prevent the cancer returning.

But not all women respond to the drug – experts estimate a third get no benefit.

The work in the journal Cancer Research suggests the problem is too much of a gene called FGFR1.

This discovery could lead to new treatments for these women as scientists “switch off” the action of FGFR1, enabling Tamoxifen to work.

The team of scientists in the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre at The Institute of Cancer Research have already shown this is possible in the lab.

They introduced a drug which “switched off” the action of FGFR1.

Once FGFR1 was stopped, hormone-based treatments like Tamoxifen could get back to work in destroying cancer cells, they found.

The researchers believe this could ultimately help thousands of women each year.

They say one in 10 breast cancer patients has too much of the FGFR1 gene.

Dr Nick Turner, who led the research, said: “Understanding how this gene can cause Tamoxifen resistance reveals a new drug target for treating breast cancers in patients who would otherwise have a poor outcome.

“There are a number of drugs in development that stop FGFR1 working, and clinical studies are investigating whether these drugs work against cancers with too many copies of this gene.

“The next step is to set up a clinical trial to see whether a drug that blocks the action of this gene can counteract hormone therapy resistance in breast cancer patients.

“If these trials confirm our lab work we could be on the verge of a potentially exciting new treatment for breast cancer.”

Dr Lesley Walker of Cancer Research UK, the charity which helped fund the work, said: “Cracking the problem of resistance to treatments such as Tamoxifen would be a major advance in treating breast cancer.”

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK affecting more than 45,500 women each year.

Tamoxifen blocks the female sex hormone oestrogen that fuels the growth of some breast tumours.

Finnish medical biotechnology group Biohit said Monday it had developed a capsule that could help prevent stomach and throat cancer by neutralising the cancer-causing compound acetaldehyde.

Acetaldehyde is produced from alcohol and sugar by microbes in the mouth. The gastric acid of a healthy stomach generally kills these microbes, but they can survive in an acid-free stomach and continue to produce acetaldehyde there.

“It is clear that acetaldehyde is a class one carcinogenic, or a cancer-causing factor of the worst kind, and it is clear that an acid-free stomach is a risk factor for stomach cancer,” Biohit chief executive Osmo Suovaniemi told AFP.

He said the capsule, developed by Biohit in collaboration with researchers from the University of Helsinki, neutralised acetaldehyde when taken with meals or alcohol and could, therefore, help prevent the development of cancer.

“How many cancer cases it may prevent in the future remains to be seen,” Suovaniemi said, adding it would take years to determine the capsule’s cancer-preventing impact.

Suovaniemi said the drug had received the approval of medical authorities after undergoing clinical testing.

Biohit aims to make the over-the-counter capsules available in Finnish pharmacies during the first half of this year and to start marketing them internationally during 2011 at the latest.

Biohit shares surged on the news and were up by 120 percent at 3.36 euros in late afternoon trading on the Helsinki stock exchange.

With acknowledgment to AFP.

The studies, presented on Monday at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting in New Orleans, tested carfilzomib given intravenously every 28 days in 73 patients who had not previously been treated with Takeda Pharmaceuticals’ (4502.T) Velcade, and in 33 others following treatment with Velcade.

“These interim results suggest that carfilzomib could benefit patients with multiple myeloma who are no longer responding to current therapies,” Dr. David Siegel, co-investigator of the studies, said in a statement.

Onyx acquired carfilzomib with its purchase last month of Proteolix Inc, saying the drug for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, has the potential for accelerated U.S. approval in 2011.

Among those who had not received prior Velcade treatment, or Velcade naive patients, carfilzomib led to an overall response rate (ORR) of 46 percent among 54 patients at a 20 milligram dose, and a 53 percent overall response among 19 patients with dose escalation to 27 mg, researchers said.

Patients who were previously treated with Velcade, known chemically as bortezomib, achieved an overall response rate of 18 percent when administered carfilzomib, researchers said.

The Velcade naive patients had relapsed or worsened following other prior therapies.

“While we do not yet model carfilzomib revenue, we do think this agent has real potential for accelerated approval and to establish a meaningful position in the multiple myeloma market based on strong activity and promising side effect profile,” Robert W Baird analyst Chris Raymond said in a research note.

Multiple myeloma results from abnormal plasma cells, usually in the bone marrow. More than 180,000 people are living with the disease worldwide and about 86,000 new cases are diagnosed annually, Onyx said.

Median survival from relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma — when the disease returns and progresses following a response to therapy — can be as short as six to nine months.

In addition to overall response, the Proteolix-sponsored trials looked at secondary goals of time-to-progression and duration of response.

In the Velcade naive group time-to-progression, or the amount of time before the disease worsens, was 7.6 months, and duration of response was 8.4 months.

In the group previously treated with Velcade, interim results showed a time-to-progression of 5.3 months and duration of response of more than 9 months.

“These findings are truly an advance for patients with multiple myeloma,” Dr. Michael Wang, of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and one of the lead investigators, said.

Noting that other life-extending drugs often have adverse side effects, including severe nerve pain, Wang said “carfilzomib is showing good response rates with an improved side effects profile.”

Treatment with carfilzomib was well tolerated with no unexpected side effects, researchers said.

More than 20 percent of patients were able to complete the full 12 cycles (48 weeks) of therapy in both studies without cumulative side effects, and with low incidence of neuropathy, researchers said.

“These data support our ongoing carfilzomib program in multiple myeloma, a disease that has poor long-term survival,” Michael Kauffman, Onyx’s interim chief medical officer, said in a statement, adding that the company could file its application seeking U.S. approval by the end of 2010.

Onyx shares were off 18 cents or 0.6 percent at $29.59 on the Nasdaq at midday.

Histopathology Bone–Multiple myeloma

The month of October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. There have been numerous articles, events, fundraisers and television programs oriented toward this theme and many of them feature the term “cure” prominently in the title.

Certainly a cure for breast cancer would be a welcome occasion, but this focus unfortunately can mask the many avenues of breast cancer prevention that are already documented; many are already available to women and some need additional research and/or legislation.

Between 1973 and 1998, the incidence of breast cancer in the U.S. increased by more than 40 percent. In 2008, an estimated 250,000 U.S. women were diagnosed with breast cancer and 40,500 died of the disease.

Clearly something is happening to cause this increase. Women need to be informed about risk factors that have developed during this 25-year period and we all need to work together to eliminate them. I would like to emphasize this point by illustrating it with a very personal example.

My wife, Nancy, reached menopause at the relatively early age of 42 and experienced the array of annoying symptoms that often characterize this event; hot flashes and moodiness being the most acute. Like so many women, she embarked on a regimen of hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, and the symptoms disappeared.

Nancy’s mother began menopause at that same age and took HRT for 34 years without event. Being her mother’s daughter, she followed her footsteps. There is no history of breast cancer in her family; but in the United States, where a woman’s lifetime risk of developing breast cancer is an alarming 1 in 8, no more than 1 in 10 women with breast cancer has a genetic history of the disease!

Nancy is one of the fortunate women whose routine mammogram screening revealed the cancer in its earliest stage before a palpable lump had developed and before the cancer spread to the lymph system. Following a regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, the odds are very good that Nancy’s cancer will not return.

I can assure you, however, that Nancy would have gladly disabused herself of the benefits of HRT in favor of avoiding the exhausting and painful treatments that were prescribed.

An estimated 80,000 synthetic chemicals have been registered for use in the United States in the last 40 years, but fewer than 10 percent of them have been fully tested for their effects on human health. Scientific evidence links toxic chemicals and radiation in our every day environment to the high rates of breast cancer. Some of this exposure is from seemingly benign sources such as cosmetics, beauty creams, sunscreen lotions, plastics and foodstuffs containing artificial hormones and additives.

We must:

* Educate ourselves and our loved ones about risky behaviors.

Some suggested links on the internet are:

http://www.breastcancerfund.org

http://www.safecosmetics.org

http://www.healthandenvironment.org

* Become involved in the legislative process. Three suggested links are:

Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition, http://www.1in8@mbcc.org

National Women’s Health Network, http://www.womenshealthnetwork.org

Jane Cusumono Foundation, http://chateauwallyfilms.com/breastcancerresources.htm

This month, when you notice pink ribbons in the grocery and department stores, and football players, golfers and politicians wearing pink, keep in mind that we not only need a cure for breast cancer, but remember also that prevention is so much easier than treating this devastating disease.

Is Prevention the Cure for Cancer?

Dr. Glen Weiss, Director of Thoracic Oncology at TGen Clinical Research Services (TCRS) at Scottsdale Healthcare, said the study showed the value of conducting computer modeling, or “in silico” research.

TCRS is a partnership of TGen and Scottsdale Healthcare. The partnership allows molecular and genomic discoveries made by TGen and others around the world to reach the patient bedside in the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center at Scottsdale Healthcare as quickly as possible through clinical trials with agents directed at specific cancer targets.

Researchers hope that over time in silico research will help lower health care costs while speeding up the process of turning scientific discoveries into treatments for patients.

“There are pathways that you can identify just from an in silico analysis. And we can use these types of tools to explore treatments for patients, down the road,” said Dr. Weiss, an Associate Investigator in TGen’s Cancer and Cell Biology Division and the senior author of the paper, which will appear in print in JTO’s November edition.

The study sought to identify metabolic pathways — a series of chemical reactions occurring within a cell — that could be targeted by drugs in patients with both small-cell and large-cell lung cancers. Small-cell lung cancer represents about 15 percent of all lung cancers. The rest are classified as non-small cell lung cancer, of which large-cell lung cancer represents about 10 percent.

The study used publicly available data sets, searching for connections that may have been previously overlooked.

“Within those datasets, there are common pathways. We point out some examples that provide some proof-of-principle from the in silico search,” said Dr. Weiss, who was joined in his research by TGen’s Dr. Chris Kingsley and by Dr. Anoor Paripati of the Scottsdale Clinical Research Institute at Scottsdale Healthcare.

As an example, the study cites one particular signaling pathway, Wnt/ß-catenin, that could be targeted by two drugs, vorinostat and dasatinib, both of which are under study in clinical trials.

“This is an exploration of the publicly available data sets in an attempt to answer a new question. It shows that you can look at pathways and identify targets. We did our validation by looking at what’s been tested, or what’s available already,” Dr. Weiss said.

In silico research, which is far less costly than conducting genetic profiling analysis of cancer tumors, will become more common as the National Cancer Institute ramps up its cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, also known as caBIG.

Such in silico research should lead to targets for further laboratory and clinical research, and also should help clinicians provide more personalized treatment for patients, Dr. Weiss said.

“There is going to be a wealth of profiling data out there in the near future. You can then apply techniques like this, and hopefully design smarter clinical trials to find the drugs that would work,” Dr. Weiss said.

The endorsement from Food and Drug Administration advisers moves the Cervarix vaccine closer to the U.S. market to compete with Merck & Co Inc’s Gardasil shot.

The panel is set to vote later on Wednesday on whether to allow Merck to widen its potential market for Gardasil by promoting the vaccine to men and boys as young as 9 for prevention of genital warts.

Both vaccines are designed to prevent infection from the human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus that causes cervical cancer and genital warts.

“CPRIT is now officially open for business,” said William “Bill” Gimson, CPRIT executive director. “Now we can get to the important work we have to do in the fight against cancer.”

RFA categories include Individual Investigator Research Awards, the High Impact/High Risk Research Awards, Recruitment Research Awards for First-time Tenure-track Faculty Members, Rising Stars, and Established Investigators. Additional cancer research and prevention services RFAs will be released over the next few months. Nobel laureate Phillip A. Sharp, Ph.D. will chair CPRIT`s Scientific Review Council which will make recommendations for funding research grant awards.

“We designed the RFAs to be broad and to encourage innovation,” said Alfred G. Gilman, M.D., Ph.D., CPRIT chief scientific officer. “They will inspire exciting proposals, and we will fund superb research.”

A more detailed description of each RFA can be found by visiting CPRIT`s website at www.cprit.state.tx.us. The online application system will be open on September 15, 2009.

A webinar focusing on the prevention program was recently held by Rebecca Garcia, Ph.D., CPRIT chief prevention officer, with an estimated 250 participants. A summary of selected questions and answers from the webinar is available by visiting http://www.cprit.state.tx.us/webinars.html.

Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT)
Sandra Balderrama, 512-305-8450

The research released Wednesday is the first to show Iressa can be more effective than chemotherapy as a first-line treatment, and some experts are hopeful it will prompt the Food and Drug Administration to allow wide use of the drug, made by AstraZeneca PLC. Others are skeptical. Though the study shows an effect on cancer growth over one year, the drug’s impact on long-term survival is still in question. Also, the study was done in Asia, and the drug seems to work best with specific patients — Asians, women and nonsmokers who carry a specific gene mutation.

“I’d venture to say that additional studies will be requested in the United States population,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, the American Cancer Society’s deputy chief medical officer.

AstraZeneca, which funded the study, is not planning a new push for expanded FDA approval of the drug, a company spokeswoman said. But the company is continuing to share data about the drug with federal health officials, she added.

Iressa is a daily pill that more precisely targets cancer rather than healthy cells. It’s an attractive alternative to standard chemotherapy, which involves trips to a hospital or clinic for infusions of poisonous chemicals that cause nausea and hair loss. In 2003, the FDA approved Iressa as a last-resort treatment for patients with the most common form of lung cancer, called non-small-cell lung cancer. The market was significant: Lung cancer kills more Americans than any other kind of tumor, and the Cancer Society estimates it will cause nearly 160,000 U.S. deaths this year. Non-small-cell lung cancer represents 85 percent of lung cancer cases.

But in 2005, the FDA stopped allowing new patients to go on Iressa after early results from a federally sponsored study failed to show it improved lung cancer patients’ survival rates. Another lung cancer pill, Roche Group’s Tarceva, acts in a way similar to Iressa and remained on the market as a treatment for patients not helped by chemotherapy. There wasn’t widespread outcry at the loss of Iressa because Tarceva remained available, said Dr. Edward Kim, a lung cancer specialist at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Interest in Iressa continued, though, as doctors have become increasingly interested in personalized approaches to cancer treatment. Studies have shown some drugs work better in certain breast and colon cancer patients than others, and earlier studies have found that Iressa dramatically shrunk tumors in patients who had lung cancers with a specific genetic mutation. That kind of scenario is observed in only a small fraction of U.S. lung cancer patients, but is much more common in Asia, scientists say.

The latest study was led by Dr. Tony Mok of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and involved about 1,200 patients throughout southeast Asia. The study group included the kind of people most likely to have the mutation, said Dr. Pasi Janne, a Dana-Farber Cancer Institute lung cancer specialist.

The study measured cancer growth within a year after treatment, comparing patients who got Iressa to others who got chemotherapy. After one year, 25 percent on Iressa were alive without their cancer getting worse, as compared to 7 percent of those on chemo. Results were even better in those with the mutation. In those without the mutation, chemotherapy was more effective. The study was published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine. A second study released by the journal concluded that large-scale screening of lung cancer patients for the genetic mutation is feasible and can lead to wiser treatment.

Cancer Facts : How Does Lung Cancer Develop? embedded by Sandy Hutchens

Lung cancer develops when smoking, air pollutants and free radical formation damages sensitive lung tissue, causing the cellular DNA to restructure and malfunction. Avoid lung cancer by quitting smoking with information from a doctor in this free video on cancer.

Expert: Dr. David Cathcart
Bio: Dr. David Cathcart specializes in occupational medicine and has an in-depth knowledge of cancer, as well as experience dealing with cancer patients and treatment for multiple years.