Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access originally published online on May 13, 2008
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2008 100(10):692-697; doi:10.1093/jnci/djn169
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© Oxford University Press 2008.
NEWS |
Hedgehog Drugs Begin To Show Results
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When researchers announced last month that a hedgehog pathway inhibitor from Genentech had shown activity in a phase I cancer clinical trial, few noticed. Phase I results are usually suggestive at best. But in this trial, eight of nine patients with advanced basal cell carcinoma responded to the Genentech drug, and all eight are still enrolled 16 months into the study. "The first patient in the world gets treated with an inhibitor of this pathway and has a dramatic response," noted principal investigator Daniel Von Hoff, M.D., of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Ariz., at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. "That ... is the essence of translational medicine."
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It was also probably the first time that a cancer drug specifically targeting a developmental pathway has shown activity in people. The hedgehog pathway is critical for embryonic and postnatal
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