Source: pr-usa.net
Author: press release

Boehringer Ingelheim will announce preliminary data in the areas of head and neck cancer and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) for one of the company’s investigational compounds, BIBW 2992. These data will be presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting in Chicago. BIBW 2992 is an orally-administered small molecule under development that irreversibly inhibits the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR/HER1) and human epidermal receptor 2 (HER2) tyrosine kinases.

BIBW 2992 data in head and neck cancer(1)

New data will report preliminary best response analysis for 74/109 patients from an ongoing Phase 2 study of 124 patients with metastatic or recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (SCCHN) who did not respond to platinum-containing therapy. In this study, patients were initially randomly assigned to either BIBW 2992 or cetuximab. Twenty-two percent of the 34 patients receiving BIBW 2992 experienced reduction in tumor size (measured as partial response), compared to 13 percent of the 40 patients receiving cetuximab. Preliminary safety analyses revealed diarrhea and skin-related adverse events as the most common adverse events associated with BIBW 2992.

“Metastatic head and neck cancer has a very poor prognosis, and patients are in desperate need for new treatment options,” says Tanguy Y. Seiwert, M.D., lead investigator of the trial, University of Chicago Medical Center. “These findings, while preliminary, are encouraging and warrant further investigation of BIBW 2992 in head and neck cancer.”