LEXINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Synta Pharmaceuticals Corp. (NASDAQ: SNTA), a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing, and commercializing small molecule drugs to treat severe medical conditions, today announced that preclinical data presented at the AACR-NCI-EORTC Conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics shows that STA-9090, a novel, synthetic inhibitor of heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90), demonstrated strong activity in multiple tumor models, including lung cancer, gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST), prostate cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, gastric cancer, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, melanoma, acute myeloid leukemia, chronic myeloid leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, B-cell lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. Potent activity was shown in cancers resistant to treatment with imatinib (Gleevec®), sunitinib (Sutent®), and erlotinib (Tarceva®), including models with genetic mutations known to make those cancers highly resistant to treatment, such as the BCR-ABL T315I mutation in leukemias, the EGFR T790M mutation in lung cancer, and the KIT Ex 11 V654A and D820A mutations in GIST. STA-9090 was also shown to have potency superior to 17-AAG, the first generation, ansamycin-family Hsp90 inhibitor, across multiple tumor models and gene mutation profiles. Other results important for considering future clinical development with STA-9090 were presented, including results showing that STA-9090 enhances the activity of the widely used cancer drug paclitaxel.
