Prostate cancer patients looking for alternatives to standard therapy, such as radiation or radical surgery, have begun treatment at the Detroit Medical Center’s radiation oncology unit at Crittenton Hospital with an experimental drug that has been designed to selectively infect and destroy only cancer cells.

The Phase I/II trial of the therapeutic, CV787, is a multi-center, open-label, dose-finding study designed to treat men with biopsy-proven, prostate-confined cancer that recurred following external beam radiation, as indicated by a rise in prostate-specific antigen (PSA) values. Developed at Calydon, Inc., a Silicon Valley biotechnology company, the drug will be clinically evaluated at up to nine leading university medical and private treatment centers throughout North America. V. Elayne Arterbery, MD, interim associate chair of Wayne State University’s radiation oncology department and clinical chief of the DMC’s Radiation Oncology Center at Crittenton Hospital, is managing the clinical evaluation of CV787.

The new trial builds on testing of Calydon’s first-generation virus, CN706, at the Brady Urological Institute and The Johns Hopkins Oncology Center. Initial data from the Phase I (safety) trial suggest that CN706 was well tolerated, safe and showed anti-tumor activity.

"Animal studies demonstrate that CV787 is a potent virus that kills 10,000 cancer cells for every one normal cell incidentally killed, compared to our first-generation virus that kills 400:1 and conventional chemotherapy agents that generally kill at a ratio of 4:1," said Daniel Henderson, PhD, president and CEO of Calydon. "We believe that this high level of specificity to cancer cells allows our drugs to work without the severe side effects seen in therapies that kill cells without the ability to discriminate between healthy and cancer cells.

"We also believe that CV787 may be effective in men with end-stage, life-threatening disease in whom the cancers have spread beyond the prostate into bones and other tissue," Dr. Henderson explained, citing recently published animal studies, in which Calydon researchers reported that intravenous CV787 killed prostate tumors that were distantly located from the virus injection site.

Calydon, Inc., a privately held company, is engaged in the development of viral therapeutics that selectively infect and destroy cancer cells for which a unique cellular marker exists, such as PSA for prostate cancer. Calydon is developing tissue specific therapeutics for prostate, liver, bladder, melanoma and ovarian cancers.