Posts tagged ‘Lung Cancer’

Is FGFR1 a molecular target for squamous cell lung cancer?

June 21st, 2011

Daedalus

Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog continues her new products focus with a recent post on “FGFR1 mutations in squamous cell lung cancer”.

As Sally notes, squamous cell carcinomas account for 25% of new lung carcinomas and 40,000 deaths per year in the United States. There is currently no FDA approved targeted therapy for this cancer.

In her insightful blog post Sally discusses recent research on FGFR1 mutations using Pfizer’s pan-FGFR inhibitor PD173074. She concludes the research is promising, but that “preclinical research is no guarantee of success in the clinic.”

Fibroglast Growth Factor Receptors (FGFR) play a potential role in carcinogenesis and may be an important target in squamous cell lung cancer. You can read more about the new products in development that seek to target them on Pharma Strategy Blog.

The MD Anderson BATTLE cancer trial – a landmark in NSCLC

April 27th, 2011

Daedalus

The results from the BATTLE (Biomarker-Integrated Approaches of Targeted Therapy for Lung Cancer elimination) clinical trial in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) undertaken at MD Anderson Cancer Center were recently published in the new AACR journal Cancer Discovery.

The BATTLE study is a landmark in that tumor biopsies were done in “real time” with adaptive randomization to erlotinib, vandetanib, erlotinib plus bexarotene or sorafenib based on relevant molecular biomarkers from the needle biopsy specimens.

Sally Church who did her doctoral research on the early detection of lung disease, has does an excellent job on Pharma Strategy Blog of reviewing the findings from this landmark clinical trial. She discusses the latest results presented by Dr Waun ki Hong in the plenary session at the recent AACR annual meeting in Orlando.

Using Storify to integrate multimedia about the BATTLE trial, Sally explains why this is a ground breaking study. You can read more on Pharma Strategy Blog.

What are the new molecular targets in lung cancer?

February 7th, 2011

Daedalus

Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog reviews a 2011 paper on molecular subsets in lung cancer published by Lowly & Carbonne in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology.

The molecular subsets to-date include KRAS, EGFR and ALK, but what is interesting is that half remain unknown.

You can read Sally’s blog post for her thoughts on what the next target may be after ALK and crizotinib.