Therapeutic Programs: Non-small cell lung cancer
Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer | Metastic Prostate Cancer | Acute Myeloid Leukemia
Lung cancer is the most common and the most deadly cancer in the world, accounting for 29% of total cancer mortality. Over 215,000 new cases of lung cancer and 161,800 deaths from lung cancer are predicted to occur in the United States during 2008. The number of lung cancer deaths is still increasing. Survival of lung cancer patients is strongly correlated with the stage of disease. Cure rates after surgical resection in patients without distant or loco-regional tumor spread is approximately 70%. Unfortunately 85% of lung cancer patients have advanced disease at presentation. For patients with advanced disease, the prognosis is dismal because the available treatment regimens (chemotherapy and radiation therapy) are essentially non-curative and primarily serve to prolong survival. Several oncogenes have been associated with lung cancer including p53, RAS, and MYC, but drugs specifically targeting these genes have yet to be commercialized.
Lung cancer has two primary presentations. Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) affects 20% of patients and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) affects approximately 80%. NSCLC consists of three major types: adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and large cell carcinoma, with lung adenocarcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas accounting for the vast majority of all lung cancers. Academic and industry labs have developed aerosol-based methods for delivering anti-sense oligonucleotides, plasmids, and siRNAs to the lungs of mice and rats. The promise of using this route of delivery and the paucity of alternative therapeutic treatments for lung cancer make it an attractive target for miRNA-based therapies. The observation that several miRNAs play key roles in lung cancer, the relative ease of miRNA drug delivery to lung and the large number of people with the disease makes lung cancer an ideal target for a miRNA based drug development program.