After Bill Schuette was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer four years ago, he tried seven kinds of chemotherapy. But in early 2009, his doctor told him he would not make it to Christmas.
“Bill,’’ Schuette recalled the doctor saying with tears in his eyes, “we don’t have anything else.’’
But this summer, Schuette, 62, is planning a 180-mile bike trip — a high point in an unexpected recovery brought about by an experimental drug he happened to hear about on TV news.
That medication, crizotinib, has become one of the most talked-about treatments in the cancer world because of its promising results, including data being presented this weekend in Chicago at the nation’s largest meeting of cancer specialists. As impressive is how rapidly the drug was developed by Pfizer, and cancer specialists say it shows the merits of a new approach to designing and testing cancer drugs.
So-called targeted cancer drugs, which are designed to disarm the specific genetic aberrations that drive a tumor, have been approved for a handful of cancers in the past decade, but increasingly, researchers are testing these drugs only in patients whose tumors carry the particular Achilles’ heel they are aimed at — with the hope that clinical trials will be quicker and cheaper because they need to enroll fewer patients.
For patients, the long-term benefit will be drugs that will likely become available faster and work better. The trade-off is that such treatments will work in smaller subsets of patients.
With the development of crizotinib and another targeted therapy, the experimental melanoma drug vemurafenib, scientists, clinicians, and drug companies say that cancer research and treatment has rounded a corner in which targeting has become integral to every part of the process from the initial drug development and testing, to the decision to give a drug.
“I think this is a one-way ticket to how to think about the treatment of cancer patients, ’’ said Dr. Todd Golub, a founding member of the Broad Institute, a Cambridge genetics research center. “There’s been a major US and international effort put in motion to identify the genetic basis of all human cancers, and the big pharma and biotech companies have done a very significant reorientation of their discovery efforts to align with this way of thinking.’’
Julian Adams, president of research and development at Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company based in Cambridge, said that he has mandated that all future trials of cancer drugs include an analysis of biological markers, to ensure that the company is designing nimble and flexible clinical trials that will ensure the drug is tested on the right patient population.
