New Gene Discovery Suggests Which Patients CTI's Brostallicin M...( Cancer drug developm...),Health

Cancer drug development guided by genomics

SAN DIEGO, April 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Systems Medicine LLC (SM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cell Therapeutics, Inc. (CTI) (Nasdaq and MTAX: CTIC), presented data from a preclinical study identifying the genetic markers in patients more likely to respond to treatment with the experimental drug, brostallicin, at the 2008 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting. These findings will be used to guide future development of brostallicin by suggesting which patients are most likely to respond when treated with brostallicin, potentially making the drug's development more efficient. This method of drug development is known as the context of vulnerability approach. The study was co-directed by Jeffrey A. Kiefer, Ph.D., and Holly Yin, Ph.D. in the Translational Genomics Research Institute's Pharmaceutical Genomics Division located in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"This study is an example of using a pharmacogenomic screening approach to find insights that guide the selection of specific contexts of vulnerability for brostallicin. These results provide information on which genetic characteristics to look for in determining whether or not a patient might benefit from treatment with brostallicin. In SM and CTI's continued efforts to make cancer more treatable, results like these broaden our knowledge of brostallicin's context of vulnerability, and bring us closer to being able to offer the right drug to each patient," said Jeffrey Jacob, CEO of SM.

In the study, the NCI-60 cell line panel was profiled for brostallicin response and correlated with specific genomic information derived from the cell line panel. The NCI-60 is a group of 59 human cancer cell lines derived from tumor tissue -- brain, blood and bone marrow, breast, colon, kidney, lung, ovary, prostate, and skin. Scientists often use cell lines, also called models, in preclinical studies in a laboratory setting. The
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