Emily Bergsland, MD, UCSF assistant clinical professor of medicine in the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center, presented the study Sunday in New Orleans at the 36 th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. It works by prohibiting the protein VEGF from activating endothelial cell growth.
Endothelial cells make new blood vessels in a process called angiogenesis.
Solid tumors cannot grow beyond the size of a pinhead without inducing the formation of new blood vessels to supply the nutritional needs of the tumor. These results are preliminary and need to be validated in larger clinical trials, but they do lend support to the idea that angiogenesis plays a critical role during tumor progression and represents a fundamentally new target for cancer treatment. The Phase II trial enrolled 104 patients who were previously untreated for metastatic colon cancer. Patients with this type of cancer have a median survival rate of one year and their treatment options are fairly limited, Bergsland said. Patients were treated until they had progressive disease.