November 5, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
AstraZeneca ‘s new ovarian cancer drug olaparib may also show promise as a potential treatment for prostate cancer, a prominent global oncologist told a well-known cancer conference Tuesday, reported Reuters.
Olaparib recently was approved by European regulators to treat inherited ovarian cancers. It will be marketed under the brand name Lynparza and is likely to become the first poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor on the market.
But Johann de Bono, professor of experimental cancer therapeutics at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, told a gathering at the National Cancer Research Institute that olaparib has shown “encouraging” initial results in clinical trials for fighting prostate cancer.
De Bono said the distinction was important because it showed olaparib may be effective in patients who do not have BRCA mutations, but do have other DNA repair genes.
“Although PARP inhibitors like olaparib have generally been trailed in women with inherited BRCA mutations, these exciting new trials could give them a whole other lease of life in advanced prostate cancer and other tumors with DNA repair mutations,” de Bono said.
De Bono made the comments after he and his clinical team parse the data from studies including a now closed mid-stage Phase II clinical trial and other advanced prostate cancer tests,
“It is too early to say whether they will prove to be beneficial in prostate cancer but the initial results from our preliminary trials have been encouraging,” he said.
