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CNN Live Saturday
A New Way to Treat Advanced Colon Cancer
Aired May 12, 2001 - 15:21 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DONNA KELLEY, CNN ANCHOR: Colon cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer. And now comes word of an experimental drug that may offer fresh hope to people suffering from advanced cases of the disease. The drug's mission: to seek out, and if not destroy, severely weaken those cells. Here's CNN's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ELIZABETH COHEN: Aurelio Alleva has advanced colon cancer, the kind that chemotherapy usually can't stop, the kind that usually kills within a few months. So, his doctors is giving him a new experimental drug. It's called C-225.
AURELIO ALLEVA, CANCER PATIENT: I think the C-225 more than anything else is a way of giving you hope.
DR. LEONARD SALTZ, MEMORIAL SLOAN KETTERING CANCER CENTER: When you consider that there are well over 50,000 deaths a year in the United States from colorectal cancer, you can appreciate how desperately we need new therapies.
COHEN: In a study of 121 patients with end-stage colon cancer that didn't respond to chemotherapy, one out of five patients saw their tumors shrink by 50 percent or more when they took C-225. The study was funded by ImClone, the company that makes the drug.
It's one of several new, so-called targeted approaches to cancer being discussed this week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
(on camera): These drugs are completely different from conventional cancer treatment, because they zero right in on the cancer sells. Chemotherapy and radiation, on the other hand, are more of a blast approach. They destroy good cells along with the bad.
(voice-over): C-225, delivered intravenously, works by limiting the cancer sells' access to growth factor, which many cells need to survive. That makes the cancer sells weaker and therefore more vulnerable to chemotherapy.
DR. LARRY NORTON, AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CLINICAL ONCOLOGY: We're learning specific targets in cancer, specific targets that can tell us what makes that cell cancerous, and what we can do to disturb that process so the cell behaves in normal fashion or goes on to die.
COHEN: But Dr. Saltz warns, on average, after about seven months on C-225, the patient's tumor started to grow again.
SALTZ: This is not a cure for cancer. This is another small step forward.
COHEN: A small step that Aurelio Alleva is hoping will buy him more time as he tries to beat advanced colon cancer.
Elizabeth Cohen, CNN, Atlanta.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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