The University of Colorado Cancer Center and other clinical trial institutions are reporting on promising results in clinical trials of the anti-cancer drug ONT-380 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology this weekend in Chicago.
The drug, used to treat a form of breast cancer called HER2+, was also used against secondary malignant growths that developed in the brain.
ONT-380, invented by Array Biopharma in Boulder, is being used in two sets of trials. In the first study of ONT-380, used in combination with the drug TDM-1, eight of eight evaluated patients experienced more than 50 percent reduction in primary brain tumor size, according to EurekAlert!, an online site of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“This drug has the potential to be the long-awaited, needed therapy that targets brain metastases in HER2+ brain cancer, and could even someday be used to prevent brain metastases in the first place. …There are women who are alive today because of this drug,” said study author Dr. Virginia Borges, director of the Breast Cancer Research Program and Young Women’s Breast Cancer Translational Program.
The second study presents overall response rates from a similar, ongoing clinical trial of ONT-380 in combination with capecitabine and/or trastuzumab. Of eight patients, four showed reduction in tumor size of more than 30 percent.
“I am thrilled to have been able to offer this therapy to a patient in her early 40s,” Borges said. “She didn’t have any other great treatment options that we would have expected to have any meaningful impact, especially on her brain. Now she’s been on the study over a year. The (metastases) in her body are gone and the brain lesion has shrunk down to a little nubbin. She’s living a normal life.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276, edraper@denverpost.com or
