Cerulean Pharma Makes Progress in Attacking the Big C with Tiny Drugs
Summary
Cerulean Pharma Makes Progress in Attacking the Big C with Tiny Drugs Xconomy Boston — Cerulean Pharma has made lots of progress since its early days in 2007 when I first visited the biotech startup, then called Tempo Pharmaceuticals, and company chairman Alan Crane broke out his laptop to show me an animation of the newly hatched firm’s nanoparticle drugs congregating inside tumors and killing them.With that data, it has begun enrolling patients into its next, Phase IIa, clinical trial, which aims to provide more evidence of the drug’s ability to treat solid tumors such as lung cancer, Fetzer said.Abraxis BioScience, which Summit, NJ-based Celgene (NASDAQ:CELG) agreed to buy for $2.9 billion in June, has gained FDA approval for an earlier nanoparticle drug that delivers a chemotherapy agent for treating lung and breast cancers.These molecules, under development at firms such as Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ALNY), are made of nucleic acid chains, which can easily be degraded by enzymes in the body before they can reach diseased cells, and Cerulean’s nanoparticles might be able to help shield them on that journey.For non-small cell lung cancer, to name one tumor type of interest in the Phase IIa, the median survival of patients who have failed to respond to existing drugs is about seven months, Fetzer said.