By The Survivors Club Staff
June 25, 2009

A new drug treatment for cancer has produced "highly promising results" in preliminary trials, according to new research published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

The new cancer drug, called Olaparib, was given to 19 patients with inherited forms of advanced breast cancer, ovarian cancer and prostate cancer caused by mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.  With 12 patients - among whom other treatments had failed - cancer tumors shrank or stabilized. In one case, a woman with breast cancer is still in remission two years after being one of the first to be treated with Olaparib.

Olaparib is a member of a new class of drugs called PARP inhibitors that target cancer cells but leave healthy cells relatively untouched.  NBC's science correspondent Robert Bazell calls this news "the most exciting development in cancer research in a decade or more.  In just a few years it could save thousands of lives."

As Bazell writes: "Some — but not all — of the patients whose cancers seemed hopeless saw them shrink drastically or disappear. Many avoided the typical side effects — nausea, hair loss — associated with cancer treatment"

Researchers, working with the drug company AstraZeneca, said the treatment was "much easier than chemotherapy."

According to the BBC, "Olaparib is the first successful example of a new type of personalised medicine using a technique called "synthetic lethality" - a subtle way of exploiting the body's own molecular weaknesses for positive effect."

"In this case," the BBC continues, "the drug takes advantage of the fact that while normal cells have several different ways of repairing damage to their DNA, one of these pathways is disabled by the BRCA mutations in tumour cells.  Olaparib blocks one of the repair pathways by shutting down a key enzyme called PARP.  This does not affect normal cells because they can call on an alternative repair mechanism, controlled by their healthy BRCA genes.  But in tumours cells, where the BRCA pathway is disabled by genetic mutation, there is no alternative repair mechanism, and the cells die."

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