New Drugs Slow Prostate Cancer Growth

A type of anti-cancer drug that blocks an important growth factor has prolonged the lives of patients with recurrent prostate cancer, say California scientists.

The drug is called pertuzumab, and is one of several medications that block the action of human epidermal growth factor (HER), which stimulates cell proliferation.

The research was conducted at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and was led by David B. Agus. The team gave pertuzumab to 41 patients with treatment-resistant prostate cancer whose disease had continued to advance after prior chemotherapy. The participants received the drug every three weeks until their disease progressed again.

MRI and CAT scans were used to monitor the tumors during therapy, and while none of the tumors got smaller, patients who received the drug lived an average of 16.4 months instead of the 10.7 months reported in a historical control group with similar tumors.

Agus said slowing tumor growth allowed patients to experience a higher quality of life for a longer time, but added that the study must be viewed cautiously because the statistics were from a historical control group.

Ultimately, we hope drugs like pertuzumab will help us … view cancer as a lifetime disease to be managed, much like AIDS is looked at now, Agus said. This would be a major shift from the current paradigm for cancer treatment and is a promising area of research.

The study report was published in the Feb. 20 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.