Pfizer Lung Cancer Drug Shows Promise

Posted on June 5, 2010

The Huffington Post reports that Pfizer's lung cancer drug called crizotinib is showing promise at shrinking tumors in early testing. Some sick patients who did not respond well to other drugs are reportedly responding to the new drug.

More than 90 percent of the 82 patients in a study saw their tumors shrink after two months on the drug, Pfizer Inc.'s crizotinib, (crih-ZAH-tin-ib), researchers reported.
Doctors had expected only about 10 percent of these very sick patients to respond to the drug, according to one of the study's leaders, Dr. Yung-Jue Bang of the Seoul National University College of Medicine in South Korea.

Yung-Jue Bang of the Seoul National University College of Medicine in South Korea says the drug is being rushed into late-stage testing. The drug target a gene found only in a small amount of lung cancers (4%) but it could be helpful for these cancer patients if future trials also prove sucessful. Reuters also has an article about crizotinib.