This story was first published in digitalhealth.net
Breast cancer drug effective in advanced prostate cancer
Cancer Research UK has welcomed news that a drug already licensed to treat some breast and ovarian cancers has been found to be effective for some men with advanced prostate cancer.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the research found that the targeted cancer drug olaparib could to block prostate cancer growth more effectively than hormone treatments in some men with faults in genes linked to DNA repair, including BRCA. Olaparib is designed to take advantage of a weakness in some prostate cancers’ ability to repair damaged DNA.
A team from The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust tested the benefits of olaparib in a trial involving 387 men whose cancer had stopped responding or had not responded to hormone therapy and had spread to other parts of the body. Researchers found that using olaparib to target faulty DNA repair genes significantly delayed disease progression.
Men with prostate cancers that had faulty BRCA1, BRCA2 or ATM genes benefited the most from the treatment, with their cancer not growing significantly for 7.4 months on average, compared with 3.6 months for those taking either enzalutamide or abiraterone. Men with alterations in any of the other 12 pre-selected DNA repair genes also benefitted from taking olaparib.
Nick James, a Cancer Research UK-funded prostate expert, said: “This paper successfully shows you can molecularly select men whose prostate cancer has BRCA or other DNA repair errors with a new class of treatment that’s not currently licenced for prostate cancer. We can see clinically meaningful gains, in both progression free survival and overall survival.”
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