CHICAGO, June 4 (Reuters) - An experimental cancer drug made by Abbott Laboratories Inc. passed its first round of human testing about six months faster than usual, thanks to a new program that aims to speed drug development.
The compound, ABT-888, is designed to help cancer drugs work better by preventing cancer cells from fighting off the treatment.
"It's a highly potent compound," Dr. Shivaani Kummar, a researcher with the National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Research, said in an interview on Monday.
Kummar presented results from the early study at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.
It was the first to be tested through the National Cancer Institute's Experimental Therapeutics program, which is designed to cut up to year off the typical 10 to 12 year process before a drug is deemed safe enough to be widely used.
"We were trying to assess whether the drug actually hits the target or whether the dose you gave was sufficient to hit the target," Dr. James Doroshow, director of the NCI's Division of Cancer and Treatment and Diagnosis, said in an interview.
The program allows companies to study how the body responds to a drug and how the drug behaves in the body in just a few patients, before they spend a lot of money on a drug that might not work.
Drug makers say it costs about $800 million to develop a new therapy from animal and laboratory studies through final human trials. The NCI program stemmed from an effort by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year to foster programs that speed drug development.
In the Abbott trial, researchers gave one dose of the pill to six people with various kinds of cancer to see if it was absorbed by the tumor and was circulating in the blood -- signs that it might actually work. It was.
Abbott's compound aims to inhibit the enzyme Poly(ADP-ribose)polymerase, or PARP, which helps cells -- especially cancer cells -- repair DNA damage. By inhibiting this enzyme, tumor cells would be more vulnerable to the effects of cancer drugs.
"It was a single agent. A single dose. We were just asking does this drug get into the person. Does it inhibit the target," Dr. Gary Gordon, a vice president of global oncology development for Abbott, said in a telephone interview.
Kummar said she and her team spent a lot of effort developing a rigorous method in the laboratory to measure whether the drug was working.
The test gave Abbott enough information to move on to more comprehensive trials.
The drug must now be tested in larger studies to see if works and has toxic effects. No toxic effects were seen in the tiny trial.
