“Unfortunately, patients whose cancers relapse or don’t respond to initial therapy face a poor outlook, as only 30 to 40 percent of these patients respond to subsequent multi-agent chemotherapy and even fewer develop long-term remissions. Most patients will eventually succumb to their disease,” says senior author Charalambos Andreadis, MD, professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Several therapies have been developed recently for targeting AML-specific genetic mutations. But the drugs prove effective for only a certain group of patients. Hence there is a need for widely applicable AML therapies.

The Investigational Drug

The present study examined the efficacy of the investigational drug – Ficlatuzumab (a first-in-class monoclonal antibody) in 17 adult patients with refractory AML. They were administered four doses of Ficlatuzumab 14 days apart, along with the chemotherapeutic drug – cytarabine.

It was shown that Ficlatuzumab shows clinical efficacy in 9 out of 17 relapsed/refractory AML patients (53%) who had a complete response when combined with chemotherapy. A progression-free survival was 31.2 months were reported in the patients.

The patients with refractory AML have higher levels of an extracellular circulating factor called hepatocyte growth factor (HGF). The drug is shown to bind with the HGF to prevent tumor growth rather than targeting a cancer-specific mutation.

“Together, our findings suggest that targeting an extracellular factor in conjunction with existing cancer therapies could be an effective therapeutic strategy for AML treatment,” says Andreadis.

Source: Medindia