This week’s pharmaceutical fiasco? Federal regulators are investigating whether a group of best-selling arthritis drugs made by Abbott Laboratories, Schering-Plough Corp. and other companies heighten the risk of cancer in youngsters.

The drug etanercept binds to TNF-alpha to block its action on the immune system.

The drugs under review are called tumor necrosis factor blockers (TNF-alpha blockers) and include Enbrel, Humira, and Remicade. The current uproar over the medications began after the Food and Drug Administration received 30 reports of children and young adults developing cancer while taking the drugs over the last 10 years. Roughly half the cases were lymphomas, a type of immune system cancer. Others reported were leukemia, melanoma and cancers of various organs. The fact that a possible association between TNF-alpha blockers and some cancers has been recognized for years in adults has only heightened the FDA’s concern.

Read more

Why do some people develop reactions in response to immune system challenges while others don’t?

This week, in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills of the University of Virginia and colleagues looked at reports of patients who experienced what they believe are severe allergic reactions to the cancer drug Erbitux. The drug, which is widely used — it had global sales of $1.1 billion in 2006 for use in treating colon, head and neck cancers — is a monoclonal antibody, a genetically engineered immune system compound designed to home in specifically on cancer cells.

The team tested 538 people, including 76 cancer patients who got Erbitux in Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina and healthy volunteers from Tennessee, California and Boston in order to gauge their reaction to the drug. Of the 76 cancer patients, 25 developed what were labelled “hypersensitivity reactions.”

Data revealed that the number of patients to develop a reaction to Erbitux varied depending on location. Platts- Mills and team found that as 22 percent of patients treated with Erbitux in Tennessee and North Carolina reported some kind of reaction, including anaphylaxis, which can rapidly lead to difficulty breathing, shock or fainting. Some of the reactions were described as life threatening. Even higher rates were reported from parts of Arkansas, Missouri and Virginia. But fewer than 1 percent of patients treated in the Northeast reported any reactions.

Read more