New U.S. trial starts of tailored cancer treatment

Researchers who found a genetic pattern that predicts who will be helped by a revolutionary new lung cancer drug said on Monday they were looking for patients to help them confirm their findings.

The team at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston needs to find patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer to see if DNA patterns indeed show who will be helped by the drug, called Iressa.

"As one of the first attempts to 'personalize' cancer therapy, this trial will be a great step forward in matching treatments with the patients most likely to benefit from them." said Dr. Thomas Lynch, director of the hospital's Thoracic Oncology Center.

Iressa, known generically as gefitinib, is one of the new generation of targeted therapies against cancer.

Made by AstraZeneca Plc, Iressa has excited doctors because it is the first drug to work really well against lung cancer. Most patients suffering from lung cancer are killed by the disease, which is the biggest cancer killer in most of the world.

Non-small-cell lung cancer accounts for about 85 percent of all cases of lung cancer, which killed more than 157,000 men and women in the United States last year.

Iressa specifically works against non-small-cell lung cancer, the most common and deadly form of the disease. But it only saves between 15 percent and 30 percent of all patients.

Earlier this year Lynch's team found mutations in a gene called EGFR, which controls a protein called epidermal growth factor receptor. This protein puts the brakes on cell growth.

In non-small-cell lung cancer, EGFR is mutated and the cells proliferate out of control to form a deadly tumor.

The mutation accelerates the protein's activity, both stimulating the growth of tumor cells and making the receptors 10 times more sensitive to Iressa's action.

The researchers hope to find 30 volunteers with the mutation to take part in the trial, which will be paid for by AstraZeneca.

In the initial study, the desirable mutations were more common in women, in Japanese patients, and in patients with a type of tumor known as adenocarcinoma.

Other cancer drugs, notably Genentech's Tarceva and ImClone Inc's Erbitux, also target EGFR.