Heat Shock Protein - Info. Please
 

Hi All,

Has anyone heard of or participated in Heat Shock Protein trials? Any information is appreciated.

Thanks, Carolyn

Hi Carolyn,

My wife Caryn hasn't been on it yet but it sounds positive and I know some docs at Sloan are very excited about it. It's definitely something I'd like as an option for Caryn.

Eric

Didn't find anything about a trial. But this abstract made it sound very promising:

Heat shock protein 90 as a drug target: some like it hot
Clinical Cancer Research 15, 9-14, January 1, 2009
Section of Medicine, The Royal Marsden Hospital/The Institute of Cancer Research, Surrey, United Kingdom. udai.banerji@icr.ac.uk

Heat shock protein 90 (HSP90) is a ubiquitously expressed chaperone that is involved in the posttranslational folding and stability of proteins. Inhibition at the NH(2)-terminal ATP-binding site leads to the degradation of client proteins by the ubiquitin proteasome pathway. Inhibition of HSP90 leads to the degradation of known oncogenes, such as ERB-B2, BRAF, and BCR-ABL, leading to the combinatorial blockade of multiple signal transduction pathways, such as the RAS-RAF-mitogen-activated protein/extracellular signal-regulated kinase kinase-extracellular signal-regulated kinase and phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase pathways. Multiple structurally diverse HSP90 inhibitors are undergoing early clinical evaluation. The clinical focus of these drugs should be solid tumors, such as breast, prostate, and lung cancers, along with malignant melanoma, in addition to hematologic malignancies, such as chronic myeloid leukemia and multiple myeloma. HSP90 inhibitors can be used as single agents or in combination with other targeted treatments or conventional forms of treatment such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Clinical trials evaluating efficacy of these agents should include innovative designs to capture cytostasis evidenced by clinical nonprogression and enrichment of patient populations by molecular characterization. The results of clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of drugs targeting this exciting target are awaited.

Still couldn't find any trials for breast cancer.

Here is a nice link to wikipedia. At the bottom of the bibliography, there are some new updates worth looking into.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_shock_protein

Hi -
There was a small trial here at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance under the number/letter "name." I only know one gal who was on it for at least a year. She got good results early on, then levelled off stable for a number of months. She was the last patient to not progress and get the longest.

I think the maker was Kosan??

Once she did have a slight progression she decided to change treatment since she had to travel from another state each week.

It was a long infusion and nausea seemed to be the immediate problem with that drug.

Carolyn,

Here's some recent information:
http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/10/6/R94

Also, an HSP trial was offered to me last year but I'm not sure whether it was at Sloan Kettering or New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center, but you may want to check both of those websites.

I remember not being interested at the time because I had local treatment to eradicate the tumor.

Joan