Pain drug enhances lung cancer therapy: study

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Adding a prescription arthritis drug
to a targeted cancer therapy triples the number of lung cancer
patients who are helped, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

Pfizer’s anti-inflammatory drug Celebrex, given along with
OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s Tarceva, increased response rates in
lung cancer patients from about 10 percent to 33 percent,
reported the researchers at the University of California, Los
Angeles.

The study, published in the journal Clinical Cancer
Research, suggests one way to help make such targeted drugs
work in more people. Drugs such as Tarceva are very effective
in a small minority of cancer patients.

But lung cancer is such a big killer that any improvement
in treatment will affect many people. More than 173,000 new
cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed in the United States
alone this year and more than 160,000 people will die of it.

Only about 15 percent of people who get lung cancer live
five years. Those with advanced disease usually live less than
a year.

Tarceva is a member of a new class of drugs known as
monoclonal antibodies. They target genes known to affect cancer
growth — in this drug’s case, the epidermal growth factor
receptor.

It only works in about 10 percent of patients, and
researchers are trying to understand why.

The UCLA team did a phase I safety study on 22 patients
with advanced lung cancer and found not only that the
combination was safe, but that it helped some live longer.

“Tarceva alone is a great drug and has a lot of clinical
benefits, but for a small proportion of patients,” Dr. Karen
Reckamp, who led the study, said in a statement.

“With this drug combination, we saw an increase in response
rates, indicating we are overcoming some resistance. We also
may be beginning to understand the mechanisms of that
resistance.”

Seven patients, or 33 percent of those tested, had partial
responses — meaning their tumors shrank a little — and in
five patients or 24 percent the tumors stopped growing for a
time, the researchers reported.

Celebrex, or celecoxib, is an anti-inflammatory known as a
COX-2 inhibitor. It affects a compound known as COX-2, which is
involved in inflammation. Recent research has shown that COX-2
seems to be especially active in lung tumors.

Studies combining Tarceva and Celebrex were stopped for a
while when some COX-2s were found to raise the risk of heart
attacks and stroke, but U.S. Food and Drug Administration
advisers recommended last year that Celebrex continue to be
studied in the treatment and prevention of cancer.