Pain drug enhances lung cancer therapy -study

WASHINGTON, June 2 (Reuters) Adding a prescription arthritis drug to a targeted cancer therapy triples the number of lung cancer patients who are helped, according to U S researchers.

Pfizer's anti-inflammatory drug Celebrex, given along with OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s Tarceva, increased response rates in lung cancer patients from about 10 per cent to 33 per cent, reported the researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, yesterday.

The study, published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, suggests one way to help make such targeted drugs work in more people. Drugs such as Tarceva are very effective in a small minority of cancer patients.

But lung cancer is such a big killer that any improvement in treatment will affect many people. More than 173,000 new cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed in the United States alone this year and more than 160,000 people will die of it.

Only about 15 per cent of people who get lung cancer live five years. Those with advanced disease usually live less than a year.

Tarceva is a member of a new class of drugs known as monoclonal antibodies. They target genes known to affect cancer growth -- in this drug's case, the epidermal growth factor receptor.

It only works in about 10 per cent of patients, and researchers are trying to understand why.

The UCLA team did a phase I safety study on 22 patients with advanced lung cancer and found not only that the combination was safe, but that it helped some live longer.

''Tarceva alone is a great drug and has a lot of clinical benefits, but for a small proportion of patients,'' Dr. Karen Reckamp, who led the study, said in a statement.

''With this drug combination, we saw an increase in response rates, indicating we are overcoming some resistance. We also may be beginning to understand the mechanisms of that resistance.'' Seven patients, or 33 per cent of those tested, had artial responses -- meaning their tumors shrank a little -- and in five patients or 24 per cent the tumors stopped growing for a time, the researchers reported.

Celebrex, or celecoxib, is an anti-inflammatory known as a COX-2 inhibitor. It affects a compound known as COX-2, which is involved in inflammation. Recent research has shown that COX-2 seems to be especially active in lung tumors.

Studies combining Tarceva and Celebrex were stopped for a while when some COX-2s were found to raise the risk of heart attacks and stroke, but U S Food and Drug Administration advisers recommended last year that Celebrex continue to be studied in the treatment and prevention of cancer.

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