Colon cancer drug may shrink tumors, extend lives

From Elizabeth Cohen
CNN Medical Unit

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Aurelio Alleva has advanced colon cancer, the kind that chemotherapy usually can't stop, the kind that usually kills within a few months.

Now his doctor is giving him a new experimental drug called C225, which studies suggest could extend his life.

COLON CANCER description risk symptoms treatment prevention Choose a link above to learn more about colon cancer. Source: WebMD

"I think the C225, more than anything else, is a way of giving you hope," Alleva said.

The drug is one of several new so-called targeted approaches to cancer being discussed this week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

"When you consider there are well over 50,000 deaths a year in the United States from colorectal cancer, you can appreciate how desperately we need new therapies," said Dr. Leonard Saltz of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

In a study of 121 patients with end-stage colon cancer that didn't respond to chemotherapy, one out of five saw their tumors treated with C225 shrink by 50 percent or more. The study was funded by ImClone, the company that makes the drug.

Zeroing in on cancer cells

Drugs like C225 are different from conventional treatments because they zero in on cancer cells. Chemotherapy and radiation, on the other hand, are more of a blasting approach. They blow away good cells along with the bad.

C225, delivered intravenously, works by limiting a cancer cell's access to growth factor, which many cells need to survive. That makes the cancer cells weaker, and therefore more vulnerable to chemotherapy.

"We're learning specific targets in cancer, specific targets that can tell us what we can do to disturb the process so the cell behaves in a normal fashion or dies," said Dr. Larry Norton, president of the American Society for Clinical Oncology.

Saltz warns that on average, after about seven months on C225, the patients' tumors started to grow again.

"This is not a cure for cancer," Saltz said. "This is a another small step forward."