New studies support Ariad's work

Ariad Pharmaceuticals, from Cambridge, MA, has released results of new studies supporting expansion of the potential clinical indications for its molecularly targeted product candidate, AP23464, to include specific difficult-to-treat solid tumors, such as breast, ovarian, prostate, liver, lung, kidney, brain, stromal and colorectal cancers.

These studies demonstrated that AP23464 potently blocks the proliferation of cancer cells whose activity is controlled by the key molecular targets of well-known marketed oncology drugs and/or those in late-stage clinical development. The list of such drugs and their oncogenic kinase targets includes: Iressa, Tarceva and Erbitux (EGFR), Herceptin (HER2), BAY-43-9006 and Gleevec (KIT).

The presentation by Dr Tomi Sawyer at the Keystone Conference on Protein Kinases and Cancer: the Promise of Molecular-based Therapies shows that when tested against over 120 potential molecular targets, AP23464 selectively and potently blocks a limited number of oncogenic proteins - which share similar sites of molecular interaction in their drug-binding pocket, including EGFR, HER2, Raf, KIT, PDGFR and FGFR3.

Previously, AP23464 was being developed solely to treat certain forms of leukemia (based on its inhibition of the Abl protein kinase and its mutant forms) and the spread of cancer to distant sites (based on its inhibition of the Src protein kinase).

'A belief commonly held by cancer researchers is that the cure for cancer will not be found by blocking any single cancer-causing target, because the growth of most cancers is driven by more than one over-activated or over-expressed oncogenic protein,' said Dr Harvey Berger, chairman and chief executive officer of Ariad. 'A product of our internal drug-discovery efforts, AP23464 represents a novel small-molecule drug to treat both solid tumors and their metastatic spread with a single molecularly targeted agent.'