Novogen, Marshall Edwards to bring ovarian cancer drug to market

By Lisa Kerner

Erie, Pa., March 29 - Marshall Edwards, Inc., majority owned by Novogen, an Australian biotechnology company, has licensed rights from Novogen Ltd. to bring to market phenoxodiol, an investigational anticancer drug.

In a study by Yale researchers, 74% of ovarian cancer patients with late-stage, platinum-resistant tumors who received the phenoxodiol and cisplatin combination showed evidence of a change in tumor growth, either tumor shrinkage or no increase in tumor size.

Data from the study were presented at the Annual Meeting on Women's Cancer, according to a company news release.

"Phenoxodiol was developed to overcome this chemical resistance within tumor cells, thereby allowing standard anticancer drugs such as cisplatin, carboplatin and paclitaxel to continue to work in this aggressive form of cancer," Michael Kelly of the Yale University School of Medicine said in the release.

"What we are seeing with phenoxodiol is an encouragingly high proportion of tumors either shrinking or stabilizing with standard drugs, when we know that the tumor is unlikely to respond to those standard drugs alone."

Novogen said a similar pivotal study, known as Ovature, is planned using phenoxodiol in combination with carboplatin.

Ovarian cancer is the gynecologic cancer most likely to lead to death among women in the United States, due partly to the development of chemotherapy resistance, the release stated.

Novogen, based in Sydney, Australia, is developing a range of therapeutics across the fields of oncology, cardiovascular disease and inflammatory diseases.

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