Paclitaxel, commonly marketed as Taxol or Taxotere, is
part of many chemotherapy drug regimens, but it has one big problem,
says Clifford Hudis, chief of the Breast Cancer Medicine Service at New
York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. "It doesn't dissolve in
water, which means we have to put the drugs in solvents to deliver them
to patients." Those solvents can cause a number of side effects,
including severe allergic reactions. Patients taking paclitaxel have to
receive heavy doses of other medications first, such as steroids and
antihistamines, before getting their chemotherapy.
Abraxane
does a neat end run around that problem. A process called protein-bound
nanoparticle technology creates tiny particles that bind the paclitaxel
to a naturally occurring protein called albumin. "The binding makes
little packets of paclitaxel, think of them as little bubbles, that
can be dissolved in water," says Hudis. This means no more solvent,
which in turn means no more medications before chemotherapy, and no more
of the side effects that go along with them. It's also shortened the
chemotherapy's infusion time from more than three hours to around half
an hour.
These practical pluses would be enough to
make anyone receiving chemotherapy rejoice. But there may also be a
bonus in terms of the drug's effectiveness. In one of the major clinical
trials that led to Abraxane's FDA approval, women who got this drug had
almost twice the response rate to chemotherapy compared with women who
received regular Taxol. This may be in part because without the need for
solvents, higher doses of paclitaxel could be delivered to the women
getting Abraxane.
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