Medindia
Why Register as Premium Member if you have Diabetes? Click Here
Medindia » Health Watch

New Drug Therapy Shows Promise to Treat Multiple Cancers

by Hannah Joy on April 16, 2018 at 7:50 PM
Listen to this News

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:

View Non AMP Site | Back to top ↑