LOS ANGELES — City of Hope, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States, today announced that the first patient to receive its novel, promising cancer medicine AOH1996 is doing well. The Phase 1 clinical trial testing the safety of a potentially cancer-stopping therapeutic developed by City of Hope in people with reoccurring solid tumors is expected to continue for the next two years. The investigational pill has been effective in preclinical research treating cells derived from breast, prostate, brain, ovarian, cervical, skin and lung cancers.
Linda Malkas, Ph.D., professor in City of Hope’s Department of Molecular Diagnostics & Experimental Therapeutics, has been working on the research and subsequent discovery and development of AOH1996 for 20 years. AOH1996 is named after Anna Olivia Healey, a young girl born in 1996 who unfortunately was not able to beat cancer. AOH1996 is exclusively licensed by City of Hope to RLL, LLC, a biotechnology company that Malkas co-founded.
Malkas believed that proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), which plays an essential role in the replication and repair of cells, would be a less toxic cancer therapy that targets mutated cancer cells while leaving normal cells alone. The treatment has been shown in preclinical research to target PCNA and inhibit the growth and spread of a broad range of human cancer cells. The research protocol notes that AOH1996 is not toxic to healthy cells and that treatment with this medicine both pauses cell DNA synthesis and inhibits DNA repair, leading to a type of cell death known as apoptosis in the cancer cells.
