Cancer Drug

Description: Researchers have developed an anti-cancer drug that can travel through the bloodstream and act solely on specific cancer proteins. The drug comes from a weed known as Thapsia garganica, which grows in Mediterranean countries and has for centuries been known to be toxic to animals. The researchers tweaked a product the plant creates, known as thapsigargin, to attack prostate tumors. Researchers: Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, with lead author Dr. Samuel Denmeade, professor of oncology, urology, pharmacology and molecular sciences.

Description: Researchers have developed an anti-cancer drug that can travel through the bloodstream and act solely on specific cancer proteins. The drug comes from a weed known as Thapsia garganica, which grows in Mediterranean countries and has for centuries been known to be toxic to animals. The researchers tweaked a product the plant creates, known as thapsigargin, to attack prostate tumors. Researchers: Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, with lead author Dr. Samuel Denmeade, professor of oncology, urology, pharmacology and molecular sciences.

Guilford Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Baltimore said yesterday that it has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for limited marketing approval for its Gliadel cancer drug implant, which is designed to fight relapses of brain cancer.The company said it filed an investigational new drug application, which, if approved, would allow the 2-year old firm to give Gliadel to a limited number of patients outside the setting of an organized clinical trial while Guilford pursues full FDA marketing approval.

A host of prescription drugs have been in low supply around the United States for some time, but doctors have been warning about a particularly acute shortage of a set of life-saving cancer drugs. Now the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said today that it has taken steps to boost the supply of those cancer drugs -- Doxil, or doxorubicin hydrochloride liposome injection, and methotrexate. On Doxil , the FDA plans to import temporarily a replacement drug called Lipodox to meet patient needs in coming weeks.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A cancer drug already on the U.S. market for years has been found in a small San Francisco study to do everything the "abortion drug," RU-486, does -- and it may be cheaper.The drug, methotrexate, caused an abortion in all 10 women in the study, along with minor short-term side effects. The study's author, Dr. Mitchell Creinin of the University of California, San Francisco, said he had begun larger studies to ascertain the drug's effectiveness and safety.Once a drug has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use against any disease -- in this case, cancer -- doctors have the authority to prescribe it for any use. But Dr. Creinin and others warned against using methotrexate to induce abortions before large-scale studies confirm its safety.

Shares of EntreMed Inc., no stranger to volatility, continued on a three-day tear yesterday that left them 48 percent higher than they were at the end of last week. The gains came as scientists prepared to release results, in two weeks, of the first tests in patients of EntreMed's highly publicized experimental cancer drug Endostatin. EntreMed said two weeks ago that it had extended a contract for manufacturing the drug, ensuring that there will be enough on hand for a second round of testing in humans.

Rockville-based EntreMed Inc. scrambled yesterday to calm the fears of investors and cancer patients after a researcher involved in overseeing human testing of the company's cancer drug said he had seen "no major clinical" response in patients. EntreMed shares dived more than 30 percent on investor fears that the highly touted drug Endostatin would not reduce the size of tumors in people the way it had in mice. The company's shares lost $12.625 to close at $28.875. Both the company and the National Cancer Institute senior investigator whose remarks set off the fervid response - Dr. James Pluda - responded yesterday by saying Phase I trials are only used to determine whether drugs are safe in people.

A new international study shows that treating ovarian cancer with Avastin delays the disease progression and may improve survival. The drug, generically called bevacizumab, seemed to keep the disease from returning for two months. It was delayed five to six months in the highest risk group. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine , was co-led by Drs. Amit Oza of the Princess Margaret Cancer Program at the University of Toronto and Timothy Perren of the St James' Institute of Oncology in Leeds, U.K. The study began in 2004 and continues for another year.

Mary Sundeen knew there was going to be trouble as soon as she fired up her home computer at 6 a.m. Thursday to check the headlines. There, quoted on a newspaper's Web site, EntreMed Inc.'s chief spokeswoman saw that a government researcher appeared to be knocking the effectiveness of the company's highly touted cancer drug. Several hours later, EntreMed's stock opened the day in a virtual freefall, touching the lives of far more people than just the shareholders who had purchased it. An analyst in Los Angeles skipped lunch, scarfing Power Bars between phone calls, to counsel investors.

BETHESDA -- Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. won the support of government medical experts yesterday to expand the approved uses of its $900 million Taxol cancer drug to include advanced, usually fatal, forms of lung and ovarian cancer.A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended use of the drug for lung cancer patients who cannot be cured by radiation or surgery and as a primary weapon in the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer.Panel members said they were impressed by studies for both new uses that show adding the drug into treatment regimens could extend the lives of patients suffering from the usually terminal advanced forms of the diseases.

A new international study shows that treating ovarian cancer with Avastin delays the disease progression and may improve survival. The drug, generically called bevacizumab, seemed to keep the disease from returning for two months. It was delayed five to six months in the highest risk group. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine , was co-led by Drs. Amit Oza of the Princess Margaret Cancer Program at the University of Toronto and Timothy Perren of the St James' Institute of Oncology in Leeds, U.K. The study began in 2004 and continues for another year.

Hospitals nationwide are experiencing shortages of critical generic intravenous drugs. We believe a fundamental reason for this national shortage is government price controls. With these limits, there is little incentive to invest in new facilities and technologies, leading to equipment failures. Manufacturers have little economic incentive to prepare for the quality assurance issues that routinely arise in the manufacturing of a sterile injectable compound. To reincentivize this process, the market needs to be free, spurring more manufacturers to produce these drugs, and encouraging reinvestment in facilities and the stockpiling of reserves.

University of Maryland women's basketball coach Brenda Frese said she was heartbroken that a chemotherapy drug used to treat her 3-year-old son, Tyler, for leukemia was in short supply and possibly unavailable. When she discovered that some companies have been accused of putting profit over production or distribution of cytarabine and other drugs, she was angry — and she began writing letters. "This is life or death, and the thought of some drugs being put out of reach made my stomach sick," she said in an interview.

WASHINGTON - Physicians who want to prescribe anti-anemia drugs for cancer patients will have to register and undergo training or risk losing access to the drugs, under a long-awaited risk-management plan unveiled Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration. The company also will require physicians to collect signed statements from patients attesting that they have been informed about the dangers of the drugs, which can cause tumors to grow faster and have shortened the lives of some cancer patients.

Contradicting an old belief, new research released yesterday found that group therapy didn't prolong the lives of women with advanced cases of breast cancer. The report in the journal Cancer found that support groups improved patients' quality of life and had beneficial effects on mood and pain, but it undercut what had been seen as the greatest potential benefit. In 1989, a landmark study found that group therapy doubled the lives of women with metastatic breast cancer, a finding that spurred proliferation of cancer support groups and fueled a debate about the effect of psychology on the course of cancer.

Cancer chemotherapy can severely damage the brain, killing crucial brain cells and causing key parts of the brain to shrink, according to two studies released this week. The new findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the phenomenon of "chemobrain" -mental fuzziness, memory loss and cognitive impairment often reported by cancer patients but often dismissed by oncologists - is a serious problem. "Those of us on the front lines have known this for a long time, but now we have some neuropathological evidence that what we are seeing involves an anatomic change," said Dr. Stewart Fleishman, director of cancer supportive services at Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York.

Pharmacists are the most respected professionals, even above doctors and clergymen. They're there when you need them, they give excellent health advice and sometimes they save lives by catching problems with incorrect doses or drug interactions.As wonderful as pharmacists are, though, they are still human. And like other mere mortals they sometimes make mistakes.Drugstore errors can range from the silly to the outrageous. Often the problem results from poor communication.Patients are notorious for misinterpreting instructions that the pharmacist assumed were simple and straightforward.

NEW YORK - Two friends of Samuel D. Waksal, the imprisoned founder and head of ImClone Systems Inc., were charged with insider trading yesterday after he testified against them before a grand jury. Dr. Zvi Fuks, 68, chairman of the radiation oncology department at Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York, and Sabina Ben-Yehuda, 51, who worked at an investment fund founded by Waksal, were charged in a federal criminal complaint in U.S. District Court in New York. Prosecutors said Fuks was on the scientific advisory board of ImClone, which makes the colon cancer drug Erbitux, when he received the inside information.

On Feb. 3, Joyce Elkins filled a prescription for a two-week supply of nitrogen mustard, a decades-old cancer drug used to treat a rare form of lymphoma. The cost was $77.50. On Feb. 17, Elkins, a 64-year-old retiree who lives in Georgetown, Texas, returned to her pharmacy for a refill. This time, after a huge increase in the wholesale price of the drug, the cost was $548.01. Elkins' insurance does not cover nitrogen mustard, which she must take for at least the next six months, at a cost that will now total nearly $7,000.

NEW YORK - In a head-to-head test of two designer cancer medications, researchers say they are now certain that neither of these drugs nor similar ones will have universal applications for lung cancer patients. The discovery by scientists at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston adds yet another chapter to the unfinished - and disappointing - story about several designer cancer drugs, which burst onto the scene with great fanfare but have left many cancer patients without hope. Iressa and Erbitux are members of the class of drugs popularly called targeted therapies.