A Maltese doctor and his team have developed a drug that is offering new hope in the treatment of cancer.
The pioneering medicine targets cancer cells without harming healthy ones and has proven to have few side effects in clinical trials.
"The concept of killing cancer cells while not harming normal cells is the holy grail in cancer research," Johann de Bono, who led a research team from the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital in the UK, said yesterday.
The twice-a-day tablet targets the genetic defect, which causes cells to turn cancerous, and has had "impressive results" on a number of patients without the painful and uncomfortable side effects associated with both chemo and radio therapy.
"This trial not only yields important results, it also points to a new direction in the development of anti-cancer drugs," the New England Journal of Medicine, which published the trial, said in an editorial. According to the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital, which ran the trial together with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, tumours shrank or stabilised in more than half of the 60 patients with inherited advanced forms of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers who were treated with the new drug, Olaparib. One of the first patients to be given the treatment is still in remission after two years.
"It is giving patients who have already tried many conventional treatments long periods of remission, free from the symptoms of cancer or major side effects," said Dr de Bono, who is originally from Birżebbuġa.
Olaparib was originally meant to target breast, ovarian and prostate cancers caused by mutations in two genes - BRACA 1 and 2 - which are found in one in every 500 people. But researchers "strongly believe" it can be used in other non-inherited forms of cancers.
"We strongly believe that this drug will be very useful more broadly in patients without this mutation. We now have to find which cancers are going to be sensitive to this particular strategy," he said.
The Institute for Cancer Research said Olaparib was the first successful example of a new type of personalised medicine that works together with a patient's own specific molecular defect.
Dr de Bono explained that cancer cells had defects in their DNA repair mechanism and the drug increased that defect, causing the cell to destroy itself but leaving healthy cells relatively unscathed.
"That defect can be used as an Achilles' heel," he said.
He compared the DNA repair pathways to a table's four legs. The table can still remain upright if one leg is removed but removing two legs will cause it to topple over. Similarly, a cancerous cell has one of its legs damaged and the drug damages another of its legs, causing it to destroy itself.
"The drug increases the defect so that the cancerous cell dies," he said.
In an interview in 2005, Dr de Bono had expressed his belief that while a cure for cancer was still a few years away, experts were close to finding a way of managing the disease to enable patients to live longer. He said yesterday that scientists were making big steps in cancer treatment.
"We are making major progress in understanding cancer and this will clearly allow us to better treat it," he said. This is not the only exciting news for Dr de Bono. Just weeks ago pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson paid a staggering $1 billion for Abiraterone, a drug that could treat up to 80 per cent of patients with aggressive and previously drug-resistant prostate cancer. The drug was tested at the Institute of Cancer Research and Dr de Bono was the lead researcher.
"This drug (Abiraterone) will change prostate cancer. There is no doubt about it," he said. The son of a retired chemist, Dr de Bono attended St Aloysius College and moved to the UK in 1984 to study at the University of Glasgow. He is married to a Scottish woman and they have three children. He is no relation to that other pioneer in his own field, lateral thinker Edward de Bono.