Tom Burke died of colon cancer only a few years ago, but not before he helped create a new drug to fight cancer.
That drug, currently called DB-67, recently received approval from the FDA for its use to be studied in cancer patients. The Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital now has obtained Investigational New Drug status for DB-67 and will conduct the first clinical trials of this drug in cancer patients, which is set to begin later this summer.
Burke, who was a professor at the UK College of Pharmacy, developed the drug with Dennis Curran, a chemistry professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Burke and Curran had worked together to develop the next generation of a class of anticancer drugs that include the currently used drugs topotecan (ovarian and lung cancer) and irinotecan (colon cancer). At the time of DB-67's initial development and testing, pharmaceutical company Novartis licensed the drug. But after Burke died, the company released its licensing of DB-67, leaving the drug with a dismal future.
However, as a pediatric oncologist and director of the Experimental Therapeutics Program at UK HealthCare's Markey Cancer Center, Dr. Jeffrey Moscow believed the drug had a future. With the enthusiastic support of Markey Cancer Center's director Dr. Alfred Cohen, Moscow put together a team of experts to complete all the necessary pre-clinical studies and to assemble the IND application package for the FDA so the drug could be used in a human clinical trial.
"Not many universities or cancer centers develop a new drug to the point of being able to test it in patients," Moscow said. "The UK Markey Cancer Center now has its own new and promising cancer drug."