( ent of Blood and Marrow Transplantation...)Measuring Enzymes At End Of Cancer Pathway Predicts Outcome Of Tarceva, Taxol

ent of Blood and Marrow Transplantation. If results of this study are verified and validated, "a CDK2 test would provide the best marker yet for effective use of Tarceva," he says. The only experimental predictive test currently available is whether lung cancer cells have a mutation in their epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), but that does not predict response to the targeted therapy in other forms of cancer, Ueno says.

"We find here that as long as CDK2 is suppressed, the drug works, so developing an accurate test for CDK2 activity would be a boon for delivering individualized therapy to patients," he says. Such a test, however, will require that patients be given the drug for a short period of time so that the agent's effect on CDK2 activity can be assessed.

In this study, the researchers exposed 10 different human breast cancer cell lines to varied doses of Tarceva and then measured activity of the CDK enzymes. They found that tumor cell death was significantly dependent on whether CDK2 activity was repressed. They then double checked those findings by "putting CDK2 back," Ueno says. "We found that the effects of Tarceva were reduced when CDK2 was given back to the cells, so this shows us that CDK2 is the real target of Tarceva.

"This presents a concept that describes how Tarceva works, and it also shows that we have a technology that can rapidly measure the true activity of CDK2 in a tumor sample," Ueno says. First author Fumiyuki Yamasaki, M.D., Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow, is presenting the findings at AACR.

ABSTRACT # 459

Profile CDK to Predict Effectiveness of Taxol

A different research team, headed by Naoto Ueno, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor in the Breast Cancer Translational Research Laboratory and the Department of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, found in a second study presented at AACR that if activity of several CDK molecules is increased - not decreased as in the Tarceva finding - then t
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Source:University Of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

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