Two-dose chemotherapy drug enters clinical trial for cancer patients
pharmafile | November 28, 2022 | News story | Research and Development |
South Korean biotech firm Hyundai Bioscience’s innovative chemotherapy drug may be able to complete cancer treatments in two doses. The new anticancer drug, Polytaxel, is set to enter a clinical trial on pancreatic cancer being held in Australia.
The drug is thought to complete chemotherapy with two doses of Polytaxel in as little as eight days. The drug is a patient-centred therapy which focuses on controlling the toxicity of the anticancer drug while helping patients receive their treatments without side effects, meaning they are able to live relatively normal lives outside of their cancer treatments.
Hyundai Bioscience are collaborating with an Australian cancer hospital for their phase 1 trial with Polytaxel for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. The drug was developed aiming to be a ‘pain-free’ cancer treatment using docetaxel, one of the major chemotherapy drugs, as the active pharmaceutical ingredient.
Park Kwang-Sik, president of Hyundai Bioscience’s Bio Division, commented: “The clinical design of Polytaxel has a very unique dosing method compared to the existing standard treatment method of docetaxel. Based on the very low toxicity of Polytaxel, a completely new standard treatment to enable pain-free anticancer treatment has emerged.” He continued: “Polytaxel showed excellent therapeutic efficacy in remission of tumour by 67% up to 83% with just three doses on days 1, 8, and 15 in pre-clinical trials. Never the less, there was no decrease at all in body weight, the most important indicator of toxicity.”
Dr Jin Geun-Woo, head of Hyundai Bioscience R&D, added: “Cytotoxic drug-based chemotherapy has not made significant progress for several decades because the dosing interval applied to animals cannot be applied directly to humans due to drug toxicity. It is inevitable for humans to have a recovery period for a period of time so that normal cells damaged by drug toxicity can recover after the previous dose, and the problem is that cancer cells also recover during such recovery periods.”
Betsy Goodfellow
