New Trojan horse drug kills cancer from the inside

London: A new anti-cancer drug that acts as a "Trojan horse" to destroy tumors from within has shown promising results for six different forms of the deadly disease, scientists said. Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research in the United Kingdom have responded to the new treatment in more than 25% of patients with advanced drug-resistant cancers, more than a quarter of cervical and bladder tumors and nearly 15% of tumors ovary and lung.

The new innovative drug, nivolumab vedotin (TV), releases a toxic substance that kills cancer cells from the inside.
The results, published in The Lancet Oncology, are so positive that the drug has now moved to phase II cervical cancer trials and will be tested in a range of additional solid tumor cancers.

The researchers conducted a global clinical trial of nearly 150 patients with different types of cancer who stopped responding to standard treatments. They discovered that a significant minority of cancer patients had responded to the drug, their tumors contracting or stopping to develop.

The researchers observed responses in 27% of patients with bladder cancer, 26.5% of cervical cancer, 14% of ovarian cancer , 13% of a esophagus, 13% of a non-small cell lung and 7% of endometrial cancer.

Responses lasted on average 5.7 months, and up to 9.5 months in some patients, the researchers said. The TV is composed of a toxic drug attached to the tail of an antibody. It is designed to look for a receptor called "tissue factor" – present at high levels on the surface of many cancer cells and badociated with poorer survival. Tissue factor binding attracts the drug to cancer cells, where it can kill them from within.

The trial initially recruited 27 patients to evaluate the safety and establish the correct dose, before extending it to 120 other patients, mainly to determine if the drug was reaching the right target, but also to determine its effect on tumors. The majority of patients at the start of the trial had advanced cancer (spread locally or around the body) that had already been treated and had become resistant to an average of three different types of treatment.

Television is currently being tested in other types of cancer, including the intestines, pancreas, squamous cell lungs, as well as in a Phase II trial as a second-line treatment of cancer. Cervical cancer.

"What's so exciting about this treatment, is that its mechanism of action is completely new.It acts as a Trojan horse to infiltrate into cancer cells and kill them." inside, "said Professor Johann de Bono, a professor at the Institute for Research Against Cancer.

"Our first study showed that it could potentially treat a large number of cancer types, especially those with very low survival rates," de Bono said.

"The television has manageable side effects, and we found good responses in patients of our trial, all with advanced-stage cancer, who had been heavily pre-treated with other drugs and who did not Had more choice, "he said. .

Researchers have already initiated further trials of this drug in different types of tumors and as a second-line treatment for cervical cancer, where response rates were particularly high. They are also developing a test to select the patients most likely to respond.