DALLAS -- Oct. 16, 1997 -- Success in treating stubborn cancers with a drug that was shelved 50 years ago has encouraged the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to provide a three-year, $447,534 grant to UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas to begin second-stage clinical tests of the drug, aminopterin.

Aminopterin is the "parent" of the commonly prescribed, cancer-fighting drug methotrexate. Originally tested in the 1940s, it fell out of favor with doctors because of concerns about toxicity and difficulties synthesizing it. In recent years, Dr. Barton Kamen, a professor of pediatrics and pharmacology at UT Southwestern, has taken a new look at the drug to see if it might prove effective in treating patients -- particularly children with leukemia -- whose cancer does not respond to methotrexate.

The pediatrician doesn't usually treat adults, but Ingrid Cofield, a 49-year-old woman from Rowlett, Texas, is glad he made an exception.

Cofield was one of several adults Kamen enrolled in a Phase I trial of the drug aminopterin last year.

Phase I trials usually are conducted to see what doses of drugs patients can tolerate. But the aminopterin made a tumor in Cofield's liver disappear.

"I didn't expect this at all," Cofield said. "I thought maybe it would become a little smaller, but not that it would all go away."

Cofield originally was diagnosed with endometrial cancer in 1993. She had a hysterectomy to remove her cancerous uterus and then went through chemotherapy. The cancer was gone for a year, but then she discovered a lump in her groin. Hormonal therapy prevented enlargement for a while, but the lump started growing again. She again underwent chemotherapy, but tests soon showed the tumor had spread to her liver.

Dr. David Scott Miller, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and holder
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Contact: Ellen Mayou
emayou@mednet.swmed.edu
214-648-3404
UT Southwestern Medical Center
17-Oct-1997