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New Drug Therapy Shows Promise to Treat Multiple Cancers

by Hannah Joy on April 16, 2018 at 7:50 PM
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Highlights

For the first time, an investigational drug has been developed that is effective and safe for cancer patients caused by an alteration in the receptor tyrosine kinase (RET). A phase I, the first-in-human study was led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.


What Type of Cancers can be Treated with BLU-667 Drug?
The new drug developed acts as a potential therapy for RET-driven cancers like medullary and papillary thyroid cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, colorectal and bile duct cancer. All the above-mentioned cancers were historically difficult to treat.

‘The new drug called BLU-667 acts as a potential therapy for RET-driven cancers such as medullary and papillary thyroid, colorectal and bile duct cancer, and non-small cell lung cancer.’

BLU-667 is an oral drug that is being investigated in a multicenter, open-label trial.

The pre-clinical and early clinical validation were published online in the issue of Cancer Discovery. The results of this phase-I trial were presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2018, Chicago.

"There is a critical un-met need for effective drugs against cancers that have the RET alteration, as there are no highly potent inhibitors currently approved specifically for these RET-driven cancers," said Vivek Subbiah, M.D., Assistant professor of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics.

Currently, for these cancers, the treatments available are:

These treatment methods were hardly successful, as they often gave rise to various side effects and decreased the patient's quality of life.

Subbiah and his team have investigated BLU-667 as a novel precision-targeted drug. Throughout the proof-of-concept trial, the drug was found to show promising activity and disease control, as a highly selective RET inhibitor.

The novel drug, BLU-667 targets RET-altered cancers with fewer side effects that are affecting non-cancerous organs. RET was found to be associated with:

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