The preliminary findings show that the drug, made by San-Francisco-based Medivation Inc., helps stop testosterone from getting into cells and driving to cancer.

 

Man suffering from advanced prostate cancer are often treated with so-called castration therapy – drugs that bloc the production of testosterone, the male hormone that drives many prostate tumors. But this therapy proved inefficient in some patients.

 

The new drug, called MDV3100, was tested on 30 patients in initial studies. “Thirteen of them (43 percent) showed sustained declines (by more than 50 percent) in serum levels of prostate specific antigen, a biomarker of prostate cancer,” the researchers wrote.

 

The Phase 2 trial is still ongoing, but the good results from the Phase 1 trial promise to prompt the Food and Drug Administration to grant Medivation permission for a large-scale Phase 3 clinical trial of 1,200 patients with resistant prostate cancer, which will determine the drug's impact on survival rates.

 

The finding is a step forward in treating prostate cancer, a disease diagnosed in approximately 220,000 US men annually. About 28,000 of them die, which makes prostate cancer the most common cancer and second-leading cancer killer among men. Worldwide, 221,000 men die annually because of it, from the 679,000 news cases diagnosed.