Panobinostat Could Benefit Some With Refractory Hodgkin's

According to research published recently in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the investigational drug panobinostat could benefit some patients diagnosed with refractory or relapsed Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Panobinostat is a histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor, a class of drugs that has traditionally performed well against refractory or relapsed Hodgkin's.

The study was led by Dr. Anas Younes of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He told Reuters Health, "These drugs work by several mechanisms, including a direct antiproliferative effect and immunomodulatory effects."

Study of patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma

Dr. Younes and colleagues carried out a Phase II study on 129 patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin's lymphoma following autologous stem-cell transplantation (ASCT).

Patients were not treatment naive--just the opposite in fact. Two thirds of them had undergone radiation therapy; almost eighty percent had had subsequent therapy following an ASCT, and over forty percent characterized as not responding to their therapy just before panobinostat.

Researchers determined that the objective response rate (ORR) was 27%, with 30 partial responses and 5 complete responses. Another 70 patients showed a best response of stable disease, for a disease control rate of 82%. In three quarters of patients, researchers noted that tumors shrank.

The median progression-free survival was 6.1 months; two-thirds of the patients needed dose reductions generally because of an adverse event. At data cutoff date, the median OS had not been reached

Critics noted that compared with Adcetris this data was weak, but Younes disagreed, saying, "Although panobinostat induced partial and complete remission in only 24% of the patients, which is lower than the 75% response rate reported with brentuximab vedotin, almost 70% of the patients treated with panobinostat had some degree of tumor shrinkage. Therefore, panobinostat is a great drug for combination strategies."

Source: LLS

More Articles

More Articles

Amazon.com is pleased to have the Lymphoma Information Network in the family of Amazon.com associates. We've agreed to ship items...

The question ought to be what are myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), since this is a group of similar blood and bone marrow diseases that...

Merkel Cell Carcinoma (MCC) is a very rare and aggressive skin cancer that usually develops when a person is in his or her 70s. It is...

Radiation Therapy Topics

...

At some point, the Seattle biotech company Cell Therapeutics Inc (CTI) should earn an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for utter and...

Site Beginnings

This site was started as Lymphoma Resource Page(s) in 1994. The site was designed to collect lymphoma...

Three papers appearing in the journal Blood and pointing towards a regulator-suppressor pill could offer hope to blood cancer...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted a third so-called Breakthrough Therapy Designation for the investigational oral...

The US Food and Drug Administration today has approved an expanded use of Imbruvica (ibrutinib) in patients with...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced that it has granted "Breakthrough Therapy Designation" for the investigational agent...

According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from the University of California, San...

Pharmacyclics has announced that the company has submitted a New Drug Application (NDA) to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for...

New research suggests that frontline radioimmunotherapy...

Gilead Sciences has announced results of the company's Phase II study of its investigational compound idelalisib, an oral inhibitor of...

Sitemap