New data shows that some sarcoma patients are benefiting from treatment with REOLYSIN, developed from a harmless virus called the reovirus that most people are exposed to at some point in their lives.
Dr. Monica Mita of the Institute of Drug Development (IDD), the Cancer Therapy and Research Center at the University of Texas Health Science Center, (UTHSC), San Antonio, Texas, delivered her findings at both the Connective Tissue Oncology Society (CTOS) annual meeting in London, U.K. and the Chemotherapy Foundation Symposium XXVI in New York in November 2008. Her oral presentation discussed the interim results of a U.S. Phase II trial investigating intravenous REOLYSIN in patients with bone and soft tissue sarcomas metastatic to the lung.
"The standard treatment for this type of sarcoma is chemotherapy, but prognosis is poor since there is no cure," said Dr. Mita. "Patients with only a few months to live face poor quality of life because chemotherapy treatments are so harsh. The goal is to introduce less invasive approaches that help extend life and provide patients with a better quality of life."
REOLYSIN, being developed by Oncolytics Biotech Inc, a Calgary-based company, preferentially replicates in cancer cells with an activated RAS pathway. Approximately two thirds of all cancers have an activated RAS pathway, including most metastatic disease. The reovirus is a segmented double-stranded RNA virus that causes only mild illness in humans. Although the virus replicates robustly in cancer cells expressing Ras, a cancer signaling pathway, it spares normal cells. Viral replication within cancer cells causes them to burst open, releasing more virus to infect other cells.
To date, thirty-five patients have been enrolled in the study, and twenty-nine are evaluable. A fifth (six of twenty-nine) of the evaluable patients experienced stable disease (SD) for more than sixteen weeks, an important benchmark for marking drug activity in these hard-to-treat cancers. Dr. Mita and her team of investigators concluded that the study has met its established objectives, and that enrollment will continue to the full fifty-two patients.