News In Brief

Grant funds study of new cancer drugs

Primo Lara, an assistant professor of medicine at the UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center, has received a $330,000 grant from the American Cancer Society to develop clinical trials that test new cancer drugs.

Lara will be studying drugs that affect cell signaling mechan- isms specific to cancer. Conventional chemotherapy works by damaging the DNA of all rapidly dividing cells, but side effects are common and the drugs are less effective on patients with metastatic disease. Researchers hope these new drug trials will produce more precise, less toxic treatments for cancer.

One clinical trial will test cisplatin, a conventional chemotherapy drug, with UC-01, a novel anticancer drug that controls cell division. The other study will combine Herceptin and docetaxel in men with aggressive prostate cancer. Herceptin works by attaching to HER2/neu, a growth factor protein that causes damaged cells to proliferate out of control. It is over-expressed in 25 percent of breast and lung cancers and about 10 percent of prostate cancers.

Trials are being conducted as part of the California Cancer Consortium, an NCI -funded collaboration between UC Davis Cancer Center, the City of Hope Medical Center and the University of Southern California.