An experimental cancer drug appears effective at targeting cancers with KRAS mutations, New Scientist reports.
As they reported yesterday in Nature, researchers from the biopharmaceutical firm Amgen and their colleagues tested a KRAS(G12C) inhibitor in mice with xenografts of human tumors. This inhibitor targets the KRAS(G12C) mutations that is present in about 13 percent of lung adenocarcinomas, 3 percent of colorectal cancers, and 2 percent of other solid tumors. They found that mice given high doses of the inhibitor, which has been dubbed AMG 510, exhibited tumor regression, and that eight out of 10 mice were free of cancer. The researchers also treated four non-small-cell lung adenocarcinoma patients with AMG 510 and two of those patients experienced shrinkage of their tumors.
As New Scientist notes, the researchers further found that the treatment appears to prime the immune system against the tumors, as when they re-introduced tumor cells into previously treated mice, the tumors did not grow.