New Oral Angiogenesis Inhibitor Offers Potential Nontoxic Therapy For A Wide Range Of Cancers

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New Oral Angiogenesis Inhibitor Offers Potential Nontoxic Therapy For A Wide Range Of Cancers
June 30, 2008
ScienceDaily

The first oral, broad-spectrum angiogenesis inhibitor, specially formulated through nanotechnology, shows promising anticancer results in mice, report researchers from Childrenís Hospital Boston.

Findings were published online on June 29 by the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Because it is nontoxic and can be taken orally, the drug, called Lodamin, may be useful as a preventive therapy for patients at high risk for cancer or as a chronic maintenance therapy for a variety of cancers, preventing tumors from forming or recurring by blocking the growth of blood vessels to feed them. Lodamin may also be useful in other diseases that involve aberrant blood-vessel growth, such as age-related macular degeneration and arthritis.

Developed by Ofra Benny, PhD, in the Children’s laboratory of the late Judah Folkman, MD, Lodamin is a novel slow-release reformulation of TNP-470, a drug developed nearly two decades ago by Donald Ingber, MD, PhD, then a fellow in Folkman’s lab, and one of the first angiogenesis inhibitors to undergo clinical testing. In clinical trials, TNP-470 suppressed a surprisingly wide range of cancers, including metastatic cancers, and produced a few complete remissions. Trials were suspended in the 1990s because of neurologic side effects that occasionally occurred at high doses, but it remains one of the broadest-spectrum angiogenesis inhibitors known.

Lodamin appears to retain TNP-470’s potency and broad spectrum of activity, but with no detectable neurotoxicity and greatly enhanced oral availability. While a number of angiogenesis inhibitors, such as Avastin, are now commercially available, most target only single angiogenic factors, such as VEGF, and they are approved only for a small number of specific cancers. In contrast, Lodamin prevented capillary growth in response to every angiogenic stimulus tested. Moreover, in mouse models, Lodamin reduced liver metastases, a fatal complication of many cancers for which there is no good treatment.

“The success of TNP-470 in Phase I and II clinical trials opened up anti-angiogenesis as an entirely new modality of cancer therapy, along with conventional chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgical approaches,” says Ingber, now co-interim director of the Vascular Biology Program at Children’s.

TNP-470 was first reformulated several years ago by Ronit Satchi-Fainaro, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Folkman’s lab, who attached a large polymer to prevent it from crossing the blood-brain barrier (Cancer Cell, March 2005). That formulation, Caplostatin, has no neurotoxicity and is being developed for clinical trials. However, it must be given intravenously.

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