Re: Synta says drug (in combination with chemos) delays worsening of melanoma

J wrote:

<
http://uk.reuters.com/article/governmentFilingsNews/idUKL2690074520070926

Synta says drug delays worsening of skin cancer
Wed Sep 26, 2007 3:43pm BST

By Michael Kahn

BARCELONA, Sept 26 (Reuters) - An experimental drug that spurs cancer
cells to commit suicide helped melanoma patients live longer and delayed
worsening of their disease, the drug's maker said on Wednesday.

Patients with skin cancer that had spread to other parts of the body lived
four months longer when using the drug -- called STA-4783 -- in
combination with the standard chemotherapy treatment paclitaxel, said
Anthony Williams, vice president of clinical research at Synta
Pharmaceuticals (SNTA.O: Quote, Profile, Research).

And the cocktail more than doubled how long patients survived without
their cancer getting worse, he told the European Cancer Conference.

http://meeting.ascopubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/16_suppl/7561
a novel inducer of heat shock protein 70 (hsp70) is a bis-thiobenzoylhydrazide compound.



<
http://www.babybiotechs.com/evaluating-clinical-trials/is-progression-free-survival-a-good-clinical-trial-endpoint/

So basically progression-free survival measures how long it takes for the tumor (in this
case) to start growing again. It seems like overall survival would be a better measure
of a drugs effectiveness since curing the disease is the ultimate goal of medicine, but
from the patients perspective, I?m not sure it?s all that bad of a measure. As I
mentioned in the last post, the median survival for the late stage metastatic cancers is
6-9 months, so a doubling in progression-free survival means an extra few month of life.

This is what a graph of PFS looks like (this is from Synta?s phase 2 trial of STA-4783).
The color circles are mine:

.