Cancer and the Great Divide

There are two types of cancer patients: those we can treat and those we can’t. As I reflect on this year and the years past during which we have applied the process of laboratory-guided treatment, I am reminded of this fact.

The EVA-PCD functional profile enables us to choose active treatments for patients, but I have sometimes wondered whether we are, in fact, choosing patients for the available drugs.  While the end result may not be all that different, e.g. superior clinical outcomes over randomly administered (standard) therapies, the path to that outcome, leaves room for interesting discussion.

I first pondered this issue at the time of completion of our earliest study. That study was conducted in childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Recognizing that the corticosteroids were among the most important drugs for ALL, we exposed freshly isolated lymphoblasts from ALL patients to dexamethasone (ex vivo). At the fourth day we measured the degree of cell death and separated the patients in “sensitive” and “resistant “ subgroups. Strikingly, those children whose lymphoblasts died in the laboratory following exposure to dexamethasone (ex-vivo), virtually all survived without relapse, while those children whose lymphoblasts did not die in the laboratory following dexamethasone exposure (ex-vivo) relapsed at an alarming rate with only 25 percent still alive at the sixth year of follow up (p=0.009).

What we had succeeded in doing by Day 4 of diagnosis was something that all the known prognostic factors, like age, WBC and male vs. female could not do, namely accurately identify the responders and survivors.

Today, when I test patients in our laboratory, I consistently double or even triple the response rates over standard protocols, yet a subset of patients are not found sensitive to the available therapies. Patients who do not respond to chemotherapy are today known, in the oncologic vernacular, as “failing therapy.” If we view these “non-responders” as a biologically distinct group (not unlike the dexamethasone-resistant ALL patients above) then our role, in the field of functional profiling, is to quickly segregate the responders (to available drugs) from the non-responders and move those “non-responders” immediately to something that will work for them. In this light, patients no longer “fail therapies” but instead “therapies fail patients.” It is then our mandate to use the ex-vivo platforms to find (and yes, discover) novel therapies and combinations that will meet their unmet need.

As the New Year is upon us I am filled with the expectation that 2013 will be one of discovery and innovation. Never before have so many interesting compounds been available for study. If we are fortunate enough to succeed in our efforts to collaborate with members of the drug development community and have the opportunity to intelligently apply functional profiling, for drug discovery, 2013 could be a very good year indeed.

A Tale of Two Trials

As I read through the November 10 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology there were two very different but highly instructive reports.

They first examined the impact of gemtuzumab ozogamicin for patients with acute myeloid leukemia. The second involved the incorporation of bevacizumab and erlotinib into the treatment of Stage III NSCLC in combination with radiation.

By way of introduction, gemtuzumab ozogamicin (GO) is an anti CD33 antibody linked to the highly toxic chemical calicheamicin. Calicheamicin, a member of enendyne class, is among the most toxic substances known to man. By linking this poison to an antibody directed against leukemia cells, it was reasoned that this novel conjugant would provide an effective therapy for leukemia. And indeed it did. But despite compelling science and what appeared to be initially good results (particularly in older patients with AML), and FDA approval for the agent, the drug was withdrawn from the market. Now, with the publication of a new study from the United Kingdom, GO is once again in the limelight as its inclusion in induction therapy resulted in a statistically significant three-year relapse-free survival advantage (p=.0007) and three year overall survival advantage (p=.05).

It appears, with regard to GO, that the clinical trial process failed to identify the clinical utility of an active and novel form of therapy for a potentially lethal disease.

The second article of interest regards a pilot study that incorporated an anti-VGEF antibody (bevacizumab) with EGFR TKI (erlotinib) along with chemotherapy and radiation. In this trial the objective response rate of 39 percent, median progression-free survival of 10.2 months and median overall survival of 10.4 months, were not demonstrably superior to contemporary results, yet toxicity was significantly enhanced. The investigators recommended against further exploration of this combination. Here the aggressive integration of targeted and conventional therapies proved a misadventure.

While these two reports are very different, they represent similar failings of the contemporary clinical trial process. The GO experience reflects the failure to identify efficacy due to contemporary clinical trial’s dilution of the benefit in select candidates, mixed in the overall population, with limited responsiveness to the agent. The second trial represents clinicians’ desire to engage in theoretically attractive clinical trials only to find that they reflect ineffective and/or more toxic treatment regimens.

On one hand, laboratory models that accurately identify responders can segregate those most likely to benefit from those who will not. GO represents just one of many interesting new classes of drugs for whom selective methodologies could prove highly valuable. The lung cancer experience reflects the failure of the research community to dedicate adequate resources to predictive clinical models.

Combinations of chemotherapy with target therapies have been the subject of investigation in our laboratory for more than a decade. For example, we observed antagonism between platins and the EGFR antagonists (gefitinib and erlotinib) two years before publication of the unsuccessful INTACT I and II Trials and three years before the unsuccessful TALENT and TRIBUTE trials.

All four of these trials combined platin based doublets with EGF-TKI’s. More recently we successfully identified favorable interactions between erlotinib and VGEF inhibitors in individual patients that have provided durable responses in our NSCLC patients as first line therapy, now out to four and five years since diagnosis. These experiences represent opportunities to explore novel therapies and avoid inadvertent antagonisms and misadventures.  In the recent JCO, a good treatment was missed while a bad treatment was advanced.

Functional profiling through use of the EVA-PCD® assay may represent the “critical path” from bench to bedside that the deputy director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration, Janet Woodcock has described as a crying need.

Do We Already Have the Tools We Need to Cure Cancer?

The rapid-fire sequence of the annual American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) meeting, held in May, followed by the annual American Society of Cllinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting, held in June, provides the opportunity to put scientific discoveries into perspective as they find their way from theoretical to practical.

Members of AACR, the basic science organization, ponder deep biological questions. Their spin-offs arrive in the hands of members of ASCO as Phase I and Phase II trials, some of which are then reported at ASCO meetings.

Many of the small molecules my laboratory has studied over the years are now slowly making their way from “Gee Whiz” to clinical therapy. At the ASCO meeting I attended many of the Phase I sessions, where alphabet soup compounds had their first “in-human” trials. As most of these compounds are familiar to me, I was very interested in these early, though highly preliminary, results.

Departing from one Developmental Therapy (Phase I) session, with visions of signal transduction pathways in my head, I attended a poster discussion on triple negative breast cancer. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it refers to an increasingly common form of breast cancer that doesn’t mark for the usual estrogen, progesterone, or HER-2 features. Often occurring in younger patients, this form of breast cancer can be aggressive and unresponsive to some forms of therapy. Much work has gone into defining sub-types of this disease and slow progress is being made.

As I examined the posters, one caught my eye, “Clinical Characteristics and Chemotherapy Options of Triple Negative Breast Cancer: Role of Classic CMF regimen. (Herr, MH et al, abstract #1053, ASCO 2012.) What these investigators showed in a series of 826 breast cancer patients was that those treated with the oldest drug combination for breast cancer (CMF) did better than those who received the more modern and more intensive anthracycline or taxane-based regimens. CMF, originally developed by Italian investigators in the 1970s, was the principal therapy for this disease for two decades before it was replaced, first by anthracycline and later by taxane-based treatments. What struck me was the unexpected superiority of this old regimen over its more modern, toxic and expensive brethren.

I began to wonder about other modern therapies and their real impact upon cancer outcomes. One study in HER-2 positive patients revealed relative equivalency between weekly taxol, every three-week Taxotere and Abraxane-based therapy. Once again, the cheaper, older, less toxic Taxol regimen proved superior. While most of the attendees at the ASCO meeting were considering how the newest VEGF inhibitor Regorafenib, or the addition of aflibercept, might impact their practices, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the results of these statistically significant, but clinically marginal survival advantages, all associated with great expense.

As I pondered the implications of the CMF results in triple negatives and those of the taxol results in HER-2 positives, I considered other old-fashioned therapies with newfound potential. Among them, losartan, the angiotensin antagonist that influences tumor stroma or the results of an earlier published study that identified intraconazole (a widely available anti-fungal therapy), as an inhibitor of the hedgehog pathway. While the pharmaceutical industry promotes the use of vismodegib, a hedgehog inhibitor for basal cell skin cancer, and dozens of trials examine VEGF and FGF inhibitors, I wondered whether losartan or intraconazole or other simple compounds and combinations might not already provide many of the tools we need. Is it possible that effective treatments for cancer are at hand?

Lacking the tools to decipher the signals and combine the agents to greatest effect, are we destined to continue to blindly administer increasingly expensive, toxic, yet arguably no more effective therapies? With the myriad of drugs and combinations available today, might it be that we “can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Platinum Resistance is in the Eye of the Beholder

I was recently apprised of an online conversation surrounding the treatment of platinum refractory and platinum resistant ovarian cancer. To clarify our terminology, platinum refractory disease refers to cancer that progresses during platinum therapy. This would be considered the most platinum resistant of the ovarian patients. The term “platinum resistant” developed over the last two decades, by Markman and others, is used to describe patients who initially respond to platinum-based chemotherapy and then relapse within six months of treatment.

While platinum refractory seems intuitively obvious, it has been suggested that platinum resistance is somewhat more arbitrary.  That is, what if one relapses one month versus five months, or seven months after treatment. In fact, studies conducted by investigators at Memorial Sloane-Kettering under Dr. David Spriggs, suggest that platinum resistance is a continuum extending from six months continuing out to 24 months and beyond. The longer the “platinum-free interval” the better the chance of response to combinations like carboplatin plus Taxol. Within the scope of this discussion I am in general agreement. However, as I describe below, this is, by far, not the whole story.

I am composing this particular blog in response to a comment that I encountered in a recent chat room discussion. The individual took an extremely strong stance stipulating that no medical oncologist should re-challenge a patient with a platinum-based regimen if they fall within the category of platinum refractory or platinum resistant. This statement is absolutely, positively WRONG.

Platinum resistance is mediated by DNA repair enzymes. These enzymes recognize and respond to platinum adducts and excise the DNA residues, replacing them with the appropriate base pairs. While this confers resistance to single agent platins, a degree of resistance which is largely is unaffected by the addition of taxanes, platinum resistance actually opens up an Achilles heel for treatment of these patients. Drugs like the antimetabolites (Gemcitabine, 5-FU), as well as the topoisomerase inhibitors become collaterally more active in those tumors with the most active DNA repair capacities. This is the reason why we have consistently observed responses in both platinum resistant and platinum refractory patients utilizing the combination of cisplatin and gemcitabine, as we reported in the original paper describing this combination in 2003 (Nagourney, R et al, Gyn Onc, 2003). Our response rate of 50 percent in heavily pre-treated and platinum resistant patients was confirmed by investigators in Ohio who reported similarly good results in patients with p-glycoprotein positive/platinum resistant disease (Rose, P, Gyn Onc 2003).  To formally test this hypothesis we conducted a national clinical trial with the GOG, which treated platinum resistant and platinum refractory patients with the combination of cisplatin plus gemcitabine. This trial provided the longest-time-to-progression for this population (six months) in the history of the GOG (Brewer et al, Gyn Onc 2006). These observations were subsequently reported in our textbook (Deoxynucleoside Analogs in Cancer Therapy, GPeters [ed] Humana Press 2006).

Similar results have been reported for Folfox in recurrent ovarian patients by Greek investigators (Pectasides, D et al, Gyn Onc 2004). To examine this phenomenon, one of the great investigators of antimetabolite chemistry, William Plunkett, conducted an instructive series of experiments in which they showed that platinum resistant ovarian cell lines expressed high levels of the DNA repair enzyme ERCC1. When these investigators blocked the ERCC1 expression with siRNA, the cell lines became resistant to the cisplatin plus gemcitabine combination, indicating beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is the cells’ own DNA repair capacity that makes it sensitive to this drug doublet.

I write this blog because it is critically important for patients and doctors alike, to understand the chemistry of these agents and their interactions. While platinum resistance may indeed confer clinical resistance to platinum, carboplatin plus Taxol and related combinations, platinum resistant tumors may actually be more sensitive to intelligently administered drug combinations. Using our laboratory platform to measure the chemosensitivity and synergy for drug combinations we have identified numerous platinum resistant and platinum refractory patients who have had dramatic and durable response to re-challenge with platinum based therapies that employ these synergistic combinations. This is why we are extremely interested to study platinum resistant patients. After all, platinum resistance is in the eye of the beholder.

What Exactly are the Targets of Targeted Therapy?

The term “targeted therapy” has entered common parlance. Like personalized medicine, targeted therapy is a generic description of drugs and combinations that inhibit specific cancer-related pathways. I am impressed by how quickly esoteric phenomena like the downstream signal in the insulin factor pathway have entered the lexicon of medical oncologists. With the advent of temsirolimus and everolimus, both rapamycin derivatives that target mTOR, we now have at our disposal agents that are every bit a part of the therapy repertoire. Unlike erlotinib that targets a specific tyrosine kinase, mTOR is a complex and multifaceted target.

There are actually two separate forms of mTOR, TORC1 and TORC2, and they sit at a critical point in cellular determination. Stimulated by the insulin growth pathway, cells must decide whether they will grow in size or divide. The mTOR proteins participate in this process by regulating protein synthesis and glucose uptake among other functions. In turn, the mTOR pathway is regulated by numerous other factors like AMP kinase and AKT. The current crop of mTOR inhibitors all target TORC1.

New classes of compounds are being developed that inhibit both TORC1 and TORC2. More interesting are the compounds that influence upstream signaling, including phosphoinositol kinase (PI3K) and AKT. What we are coming to learn, however, is that these are not targets but collections of targets. Indeed, the PI3K inhibitors themselves have influence on one, two or all of the distinct classes of phosphoinositol kinases.

Most of the studies to date have used compounds that affect all the classes equally (pan-inhibitors). Pharmaceutical companies are now developing highly selective inhibitors of this fundamental pathway. In addition, duel inhibitors that target both PI3K and mTOR are in clinical trials. What we are coming to realize is the complexity of these pathways. What may prove more vexing still is their redundancy. One well-established by-product of successful inhibition of mTOR (principally TORC1) is the upstream activity of AKT via a feedback loop. This has the undesirable affect of redoubling mTOR stimulation through the very pharmacological manipulation that was designed to inhibit it. Again, an unintended consequence of a well laid plan.

To unravel the complexities and redundancies of these processes, we have utilized the primary culture platform. It enables us to examine the end result of signal inhibition and dissect disease specific profiles. Using this approach we can partner with collaborators to define the specific operative pathways in each disease entity.

Biological complexity is the hallmark of life. We ignore it at our peril.

The Avastin Saga Continues

We previously wrote about bevacizumab (Avastin) and its approval for breast cancer. The early clinical trials revealed evidence of improved time to disease progression. This surrogate measure for survival benefit had, over recent years, gained popularity, as time to disease progression is a measure of the impact of a given treatment upon the patient’s response durability. It was hoped and believed that time to progression would be an early measure of survival.

Unfortunately, the survival advantage for the Avastin-based therapies in breast cancer has not met statistical significance. As such, careful review by the oncology drug committee of the FDA lead to a unanimous decision to remove Avastin’s indication in breast cancer. Avastin has not been removed from the market, but instead, cannot be promoted or advertised, nor do insurers necessarily reimburse it. This decision, however, will have a very big impact on Medicare patients and many others who are in managed care programs (HMOs).

There are no villains here. Instead, dedicated physicians empowered to scrutinize the best data could not prove beyond any doubt that the drug improved survival. The time to progression data was favorable and the survival data also trended in a favorable direction. But, the final arbiter of clinical approval — statistically significant survival — was not met.

The physicians who want to provide this for the patients, the company that produces the drug and the patients who believe it offers benefit all have legitimate positions. As Jerome Groopman, MD, once said, in a similar situation with regard to the FDA approval of interleukin 2 (a biological agent with profound activity in a small minority of melanoma and renal cell cancer patients), “I am confronted with a dilemma of biblical proportions, how to help the few at the expense of the many.”

The Avastin saga is but one example of what will occur repeatedly. The one-size-fits-all paradigm is crumbling as individual patients with unique biological features confront the results of the blunt instrument of randomized clinical trials. Our laboratory has been deeply involved in these stories for 20 years. When we first observed synergy for purine analogs (2CDA and fludarabine) with cytoxan, and then recommended and used this doublet in advanced hematologic malignancies (highly successfully, we might add) we were a lone voice in the woods. Eventually, clinical trials conducted at M.D. Anderson and other centers confirmed the activity establishing these treatments as the standards of care for CLL and low-grade lymphoma.

The exact same experience occurred in our solid tumor work when we combined cisplatin plus gemcitabine in pancreatic, ovarian, breast, bladder, lung and other cancers. While our first patient (presumably the first patient in the world) received cisplatin plus gemcitabine for drug-resistant recurrent ovarian cancer in 1995 — providing her an additional five years of life — it wasn’t until 2006 that the FDA approved the closely related carboplatin plus gemcitabine for this indication.

We now confront an even greater hurdle. With our discoveries, using novel combinations of targeted agents, we are years (perhaps decades) ahead of the clinical trial process. We know that patients evaluated in our laboratory with favorable profiles can respond to some of the newest drugs, many of which have already completed Phase I of clinical trials. It is our fervent belief that we could accelerate the drug development process if we could join with the pharmaceutical companies and the FDA to put these hypotheses to a formal test.

Again, there are no villains here. Patients want, and should, receive active drugs. Doctors should be allowed to give them. The drug companies want to sell their agents and the FDA wants to see good therapies go forward.

The rancor that surrounds these emotionally charged issues will best be resolved when we introduce techniques that match patients to active therapies. We believe that the primary culture platform used in our laboratory, and a small number of dedicated investigators like us, may be the answer to this dilemma.

We will redouble our efforts to apply these methods for our patients and encourage our patients to lobby their health care insurers and representatives to sponsor these approaches. To date, we have been unsuccessful in convincing any cooperative group to test the predictive ability of these selection methodologies. In response, I reiterate that I will gladly participate and, to the best of my ability, support at least the laboratory component of any fair test of our primary culture methodologies.

We stand at the ready for the challenge.

Melanoma, the Immune System, and Targeted Therapies

For those of you who have been following the recent news coming from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) held in Chicago, you have heard of the breakthroughs for the treatment of malignant melanoma.

Melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer, arises as a pigmented lesion (mole or large freckle), generally in sun-exposed areas. Though curable in its earliest stages, once these malignancies disseminate, they can be the most aggressive and hard to treat cancers known to oncologists. That is, until recently when two important discoveries were made.

The first discovery actually dates back many years. It turns out that melanoma is one of those cancers that occasionally, spontaneously, regresses and that a subset of patients respond to interferon (an immune protein). This suggested a role for the immune system.

The next piece of evidence came from work in the 1980s, conducted by Steven Rosenberg, MD, PhD, at the National Cancer Institute. Using a genetically engineered human protein (interleukin 2-IL2), these investigators reported responses in patients with metastatic melanoma. Again, an immune component to this dreaded disease.

Fast-forward two decades. Investigators unraveling the complexities of human immunity realized that the cancer cells weren’t being recognized and effectively controlled by lymphocytes. Something was dampening the immune response. With the discovery of ipilumumab, an antibody directed against CTL4, scientists could now turn off the “off” switch, thereby turning on the immune system.

Survival advantages have been substantial. This therapy is now available to patients in need.

The second discovery represents a triumph for “targeted” therapy. As the gene BRAF, was recognized to be mutated in the majority of melanoma patients, drugs were developed to turn off this important pathway. Unfortunately, the first generation BRAF inhibitor sorafenib, could not shut down what proved to be the most common variant of the BRAF mutation, known as V600E.

To the rescue came a compound now known as vemurafenib. By turning off the V600E signal, those patients with this specific mutation (about 60 percent) responded dramatically.

While both these discoveries are meritorious, the responses in most patients unfortunately have not been very durable, with relapses generally occurring months or the first year after starting therapy. Interestingly, secondary pathways, like N-RAS and C-RAF, may step to the fore and overtake the effect of the BRAF inhibition. This offers hope that third generation small molecules will address these resistant clones.

In our laboratory, we are currently examining small molecules that inhibit the RAS and other pathways to determine whether new strategies may overcome these resistance mechanisms in melanoma. As a proof of concept, these reports from ASCO establish that the era of targeted therapy in melanoma is here.

Jump Starting Cancer Drug Development

The April 12 issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) features a lead article by investigators at NYU, Cornell and Rational Therapeutics, on the identification of three compounds that inhibit the important cell signaling pathway known as WNT.

The WNT pathway was originally described in fruit flies as a determinate of wing shape. It was subsequently shown to be an important factor in human stem cell differentiation. Thereafter, its role in cancer was described. Certain colon cancers associated with a familial syndrome have a mutation in the WNT pathway. This results in an extremely high incidence of colon cancer. We now know that lung cancers, breast cancers, leukemias and lymphomas may share this pathway.

To date, there have been no clinical therapies available to treat WNT-driven tumors. Recognizing the importance of this pathway, the investigators at NYU and Cornell used a technology known as small interfering RNA (SIRNA) to shut down the WNT signal. They then screened 14,000 know chemicals for activity that mimicked the SIRNA effect. Three compounds were identified.

When the compounds showed activity in cell-lines that were WNT addicted, the investigators at NYU provided the compounds to Rational Therapeutics where we applied the EVA-PCD technique to measure activity in human tumor samples. The results confirmed activity and showed that several colon cancers, as well as other tumor types, had favorable profiles. The compounds were not uniformly effective, indicating that they were not simply toxins. Instead, they appeared to selectively injure cells that we assume are driven by WNT-related events.

The beauty of this study represents the introduction of a new paradigm of drug development. Following the elegant and highly sophisticated high throughput method employed by investigators at NYU and Cornell, these compounds were put to the very practical test of human relevance. The identification of activity in human tissues at concentrations similar to those associated with other classes of drugs, suggest that these novel compounds may have promise with these heretofore-untreatable cancers. This highly productive collaboration could prove a new model for the development of effective new therapies.

Why do People get Cancer?

While there are a lot of reasons why people develop cancer, there is a growing recognition that a subset of patients carries genetic predispositions for the disease. Some of these genetic syndromes result in childhood cancers like the retinoblastoma gene or mutations in P53. These abnormalities are so profound that virtually all patients develop aggressive cancers at an early age. However, there is a second group of genetically driven cancers that are being encountered in young and middle aged adult patients. One of the best described is the ovarian/breast cancer syndrome associated with the BRCA 1 and 2 genes. Another group of patients carry a DNA repair deficiency known as mismatch repair or Lynch Syndrome.

Not unlike the BRCA patients, people with mismatch repair have an inability to respond to DNA damage. This failure leads to mutational events that, over the course of a lifetime, can result in cancer. We now know that the BRCA genes may provide therapeutic opportunities as the new class of drugs known as PARP inhibitors can target them. What we are now learning is that the Lynch Syndrome patients may have a similar attribute that can, in some circumstances, render them “hypersensitive” to chemotherapeutics. One such patient has been under my care for the last two years.

This charming 43-year-old patient presented with cancer of the uterus. She was managed by a gynecologic oncology service and received a combination of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. One year later, she revealed recurrent disease in the right, lower abdomen with involvement in the liver. Impending bowel obstruction lead to surgical exploration, providing my laboratory with tissue for analysis. When I first received the tissue specimen, I was expecting recurrent uterine cancer, the same diagnosis for which she had been treated the year earlier. But, to my surprise, the patient was actually diagnosed with colon cancer. This triggered an analysis of her mismatch repair gene and provided confirmation of Lynch Syndrome.

What I found amazing was that this patient’s colon cancer was sensitive to a two-drug combination that I had never in my career administered for colon cancer. Indeed, in my published work I had consistently identified colon cancer as a bad target for this doublet. Yet, this patient’s tumor was unequivocally sensitive to the combination. Her response was as prompt as it was dramatic — a complete remission within a scant few months. And then, in follow up, her PET/CT revealed a small focus of abnormality, seemingly associated with the colon. With a negative colonoscopy, we waited an additional several months and repeated the study. This time, it was even more evident; there was clearly an abnormality in the left pelvis.

A biopsy provided an unexpected finding. It was cancer, but it wasn’t colon cancer. The patient’s original uterine cancer from two years earlier had recurred, most likely as a residual vestige of tumor from an incomplete resection two years before. The drug response profile was distinctly different, but highly consistent with a profile one might find in a patient with mismatch repair. As we prepared to treat the patient, she developed gastrointestinal bleeding, a workup for which confirmed erosion by the uterine cancer into the bowel wall. We decided to use our findings to treat the patient and initiated a three-drug combination. The patient’s tolerance was excellent and gastrointestinal bleeding stopped immediately.

She is now receiving additional courses of therapy and will be evaluated for response in the coming months. While it is too early to know how well she’ll respond, we are optimistic regarding her outcome. Among the most interesting feature of this and related cases is the fact that the genetic mutation that caused her cancer may be the same genetic mutation that makes it possible for us to treat her.

Are New Cancer Drugs Always Better?

Few cancers instill a greater sense of fear in the medical oncologist that metastatic renal cell carcinoma, the most common form of which is known as clear cell cancer. This type of kidney cancer — driven by a mutation in a gene know as VHL — spreads rapidly, metastasizes to almost any and all organs and historically responded to almost no therapies. The development of Interleukin-2 (IL-2) in the 1980s offered a glimmer of hope. Yet, even this breakthrough ultimately yielded complete and durable responses in a mere 10 percent of patients.

By focusing on the hyper-vascular nature of this disease, investigators then developed a second line of defense that attacked the blood supply of these cancers. Following the introduction of Avastin, a number of small molecule VEGF inhibitors were introduced. Most recently, a class of drugs known as mTOR inhibitors gained popularity by providing objective responses and showing evidence of improved survival.

But what happens when all the really “hot new drugs” fail to provide benefit?

This was a question I confronted in a charming, 68-year-old neurologist who traveled to visit me from Stanford University where he received highly appropriate, yet unfortunately ineffective therapy. The patient presented in July 2010 with rapidly progressive kidney cancer that had overtaken his lungs. He was started on oral Sutent (the treatment of choice). His management was complicated by a hemolytic anemia. When I met the patient in October, I was concerned that he could not survive long enough to take on another treatment, no matter how effective it might ultimately prove to be.

As a physician, he beseeched me to study his tumor in the hope of finding any therapy to salvage him from his rapidly deteriorating course. A small biopsy was obtained with the help of one of our surgical colleagues. The results were striking — no evidence of activity for sorafenib, sunitinib (Sutent), nor the Rapalogs (Rapamycin derivatives). In one fell swoop, all of the newest therapies were swept aside with little likelihood of benefit. Despite the established literature, this patient was clearly sensitive to chemotherapeutics. It was evident to me that the treatment outline, a combination of three drugs, could provide meaningful clinical benefit if the patient could tolerate even the most modest associated side effects. With the kind cooperation of the treating physician in Northern California, our recipe was followed to a T.

The treating oncologist pulled no punches in his description of this patient’s prognosis. Nonetheless, he kindly assisted in the management of the treatment we described. While the cancer-related hemolytic anemia raged, and the patient fought for air, the treatments were delivered. Too ill to leave the hospital, his entire first course of therapy was delivered on an inpatient basis.

For several weeks, we anticipated the worst. And then, a phone call from a chipper-sounding patient. Breathing comfortable, his chest x-ray had cleared, his anemia had resolved and he was being readied for discharge. A short time later, an abdominal ultrasound revealed measurable improvement in the kidney cancer, further confirming objective response.

The patient, now home, could not be happier. The excellent outcome is as gratifying as it is unexpected. There is no question that no one else would have given this treatment. And there is further no question that the patient would not be alive today had he not received it. There are many lessons to be learned from this experience. Among them, that every patient deserves the opportunity to get better; that laboratory analyses can identify unexpected options for patients, even with the worst malignancies; that new drugs aren’t always better drugs; and finally, that nothing succeeds like success.