A trial looking at 17-AAG for advanced melanoma skin cancer (PH2/049)

Cancer type:

Melanoma

Skin cancer

Status:

Results

Phase:

Phase 2

This trial was looking at a new treatment called 17-AAG for melanoma that had come back after treatment. This trial was supported by Cancer Research UK.

Melanoma is a type of skin cancer. Doctors usually treat it with surgery and sometimes with biological therapy, radiotherapy or chemotherapy. But sometimes the cancer continues to grow despite treatment. 17-AAG is a new drug that doctors think may be useful for melanoma that has continued to grow following treatment.

Many proteins are needed for a cell to grow and divide. 17-AAG blocks several of these proteins. Researchers hoped that blocking these proteins would stop the cancer from growing, or even shrink it a bit. But this was very early research and they were not sure yet how well it would work.

The aims of this trial were to find out

How well 17-AAG worked for advanced melanoma
What happened to 17-AAG in the body
More about the side effects

Summary of results

The researchers were only able to recruit a small number of people into the trial. So they were not able to make any conclusions about how well 17-AAG worked for advanced melanoma or what happened to 17-AAG in the body.

Of the 14 people recruited to this trial, 11 had 17-AAG. And so, the researchers were able to learn more about the side effects of 17-AAG. The main side effects reported were

Feeling, or being, sick
Diarrhoea
Headache
Tiredness

We have based this summary on information from the team who ran the trial. As far as we are aware, the information they sent us has not been reviewed independently (peer reviewed Open a glossary item ) or published in a medical journal yet. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team. We have not analysed the data ourselves.