Interview
with Neil Love, MD from Breast Cancer Update for Medical Oncologists,
Program 2 2000
Play
Audio Below:
The
thing that I started working on it in the program at UCSF when I
went out there. I was pretty skeptical about liposomes and what
liposomes would do. And Chris Benz wanted to work on immunoliposomes.
That is, taking a liposome that had this polyethylene glycol on
the outside of it and attaching the HER 2 monoclonal or part of
it, the FAB 2 of a HER2, to the outer surface and using that as
a targeting technique. Well, I was pretty skeptical to begin with,
but gradually got more and more interested in this to the point
where I spent all of my time doing this – went to the company
that actually had the patent for it. Because I found the pre-clinical
data very compelling – that you could, in fact, use the physical
characteristics of this delivery system to get higher drug doses
to the tumor than you do to the normal tissues. And I think the
proof of principle is very clear in all the pre-clinical models.
I think its pretty clear in Kaposi’s sarcoma and I think that
we’re gradually building up the data in the clinic. Excellent
data on ovarian cancer with Doxil and its like the whole issue with
the high dose therapy. I mean, we started on those concepts in the
‘60s; we started doing uncontrolled trials in the ‘70s;
we started doing the randomized trials in the mid-‘80s; it
takes a long time to fully test a concept like that. And we’re
far from doing that with this delivery system, but certainly the
study of Doxil was very consistent with what I’ve done throughout
most of my career.
