MRI and PET scans indicate the effectiveness of a cancer drug developed by biopharmaceutical firm Halozyme Therapeutics, according to results presented at the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer, National Cancer Institute, and American Society of Clinical Oncology (EORTC-NCI-ASCO) annual meeting in Brussels last week.
Halozyme's pegylated rHuPH20 (PEGPH20) was used in two phase I clinical studies involving patients with advanced solid tumors that did not respond to prior therapies, the firm said. In the studies, tumor imaging from subsets of patients pre- and postadministration of PEGPH20 demonstrated that PEGPH20 treatment restored tumor perfusion and decreased metabolic activity in tumors.
Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI showed that contrast media was able to access a pancreatic tumor more easily after the administration of PEGPH20, according to Halozyme. In addition, FDG-PET imaging showed a reduction in metabolic activity of lung metastases in a patient with metastatic rectal carcinoma after PEGPH20 treatment.
