Showing posts with label anti-angiogenesis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-angiogenesis. Show all posts

Thursday, June 16, 2011

A glass of CABERNET or MERLOT for a leaky case of AMD

Extract of my guest post at maiBlog, a radiology-focused blog.

"Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in adults over 50 years age. While 90% of AMD patients have the dry-type AMD (atrophic), it is the wet AMD (exudative), driven by choroidal neovascularization (CNV), which is responsible for severe and acute vision loss in over 90% of the patients. Famous people, like the artist Georgia O’Keefe, entertainer Bob Hope and the author Henry Grunwald have coped with AMD. There are over 1.6 million people with AMD in the United States and about 200,000 people are diagnosed with wet AMD every year


One promising approach in late-stage clinical development is the use of beta-radiation to selectively target the proliferating cells in the macular lesion. A small company 40-miles south of San Francisco called NeoVista in Newark, Calif., is at the forefront of testing an epimacular brachytherapy device in the pivotal CABERNET (CNV Secondary AMD Treated with BEta RadiatioN Epiretinal Therapy) Study. ..."

Click here to read full post at maiBlog.

(Find this post at InternetArchive here.)


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Sunday, February 6, 2011

Oncology Focused Pharmacogenomic "predictive" Biomarkers

Pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics (abbreviated together as PGx) are key to the future of personalized medicine.  Pharmacogenomic biomarkers provide tools to predict (a) drug response or (b) adverse drug reactions.  Such biomarkers help to maximize efficacy and minimize toxicity. 

Monday, November 22, 2010

Mining aminoacyl tRNA synthases (aaRSs) for anti-angiogenic factors

Aminoacyl tRNA synthases (aaRSs) are ancient catalytic enzymes that catalyze the first step in protein synthesis, transfer of amino acid to its cognate tRNA, something that we learned years ago in Stryer’s Biochemistry.  But, these enzymes are also moonlighting proteins, with alternate splice forms or natural proteolytic fragments, acting as cytokines, angiogenic factors or angiostatic factors. The one that caught my eye was tryptophanyl-tRNA synthase (TrpRS) fragment which is antiangiogenic and is in clinical development for retinal diseases [...][...].

Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Prostate Cancer: New drugs in the post “Abiraterone-Jevtana-Provenge” world


The success of three new drugs (Abiraterone, Jevtana and Provenge) for castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) this year, each targeting different pathways, and all showing an overall survival benefit, has raised the bar for those dreaming to join the club.  There is at least one riding the popularity vote, MDV3100, which may complete phase 3 next year.  Still, many struggle and plough through phase  1 and 2.  One way to understand, what may make some of them unique – and the reason they may evolve into serious competition one day – is to lay them out in separate classes or targets.  This is what I have done below.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Cancer drugs RIPed in 2010


Four of the top ten Phase III failures of 2010 that were listed at FierceBiotech on Oct 21st are cancer drugs, and that's a big number!

Friday, October 15, 2010

Five year anniversary of Nexavar® (sorafenib) approval by FDA

In about two months, five days before Christmas, sorafenib will celebrate five years of approval by the FDA.  When it was approved on December 20th, 2005, for advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC), it was the first (and is so far the only) approved drug to target B-Raf kinase, a signaling component of the MAPK pathway.  Since then it has also been approved for Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC).

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Old Drugs have a lot more Firepower

Celgene Corporation (NASDAQ:CELG) was in the news a few months ago for buying Abraxis BioScience for 2.9 billion (read: A Billionaire’s Biotech Deal And Old Drugs Reborn at forbes.com, or Prominent Drug Chief to Sell Abraxis BioScience to Celgene for $2.9 Billion at nytimes.com)  With this purchase, Celgene has become a big player in the  Oncology biz-space with two re-incarnated drugs: