Drug giants unite to develop cancer therapy

On 1 June, AstraZeneca, based in London, and Merck & Co., headquartered in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, announced plans to collaborate to test a combination therapy comprising two early-stage cancer drug candidates. The therapy will combine AstraZeneca's AZD6244, which targets a protein called MEK and is in phase II clinical trials, and Merck's MK-2206, a compound that blocks a protein called AKT and has just completed a phase I clinical trial.

In recent years, companies have been pursuing cancer therapies that block specific proteins or pathways that help cancer cells to thrive. In the process, researchers have also gained an appreciation of how wily tumours can escape such therapies. One particularly vexing problem is the wide variety of mutations that can be found within a single tumour (see Cancer complexity slows quest for cure).