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WASHINGTON (AP) - Only a fraction of patients with hard-to-treat lymphoma ever try two breakthrough "smart-bomb" drugs that bring radiation straight to cancerous cells — with just two shots a week apart, not the usual months of care. The marketing failure has a manufacturer trying to sell off one of the drugs, and increasingly frustrated specialists worry it will jeopardize attempts to expand this promising new field to fight other cancers, too.
It's called radioimmunotherapy, harnessing homing device-like immune cells — antibodies — with a radioactive drug. The antibodies zero in on cancer and drop their payload, without as much damage to surrounding healthy tissue as chemotherapy can cause.
Only two such drugs are sold today, the lymphoma fighters Zevalin and Bexxar. But more than half a dozen early stage studies of others — against some particularly deadly malignancies, including pancreatic cancer, brain cancers, and advanced prostate cancer — are under way.
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