biotech
First Antisense Drug for Chemotherapy-Responsive Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia
Filed in archive Drugs, Vaccines and Therapeutics , Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics by ruth on February 19, 2007
First Antisense Drug for Chemotherapy-Responsive Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia
A phase III clinical trial for oblimersen (trade name: Genasense), the first "antisense" drug to be tested in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), shows promise as an adjunct therapy to chemotherapy drug fludarabine.
Oblimersen is an experimental agent that inhibits the production of a protein known as Bcl-2 in cancer cells. This protein can stop a cell from destroying itself, and is often over-expressed in cancer. As an antisense drug, oblimersen provides a complementary genetic strand to the messenger RNA that produces Bcl-2, inactivating it and preventing the protein from being produced. "It gets rid of Bcl-2, and cells that have less Bcl-2 are more sensitive to chemotherapy," O'Brien says.

According to the results, oblimersen produced a four-fold increase in CP/nPR, a clinical response defined by no definitive evidence of disease among patients who were sensitive to the chemotherapy drug fludarabine. In addition, survival was found to be three or more years in 70 percent of the patients in the oblimersen group compared with 38% in the chemotherapy-alone group. According to the researchers, oblimersen may represent a new treatment option for this subset of CLL patients whose disease has progressed, but who are still sensitive to chemotherapy.

Source: UT MD Anderson Cancer Center

Permalink: First Antisense Drug for Chemotherapy-Responsive Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia
Tags: leukemia  antisense  gene+therapy  biotech  drug  antisense+drug  lymphocytic+leukemia  first+antisense 
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