Sanofi-Aventis (NYSE:SNY) and its fully owned subsidiary, BiPar Sciences, today announced results from a randomized Phase 2 clinical trial of its experimental cancer drug BSI-201. The treatment shrank tumors and slowed new growth in a study of 116 patients with advanced breast tumors, an aggressive disease that doesn't respond to many treatments. Approximately 62% of patients receiving BSI-201 in combination with chemotherapy showed clinical benefit, compared with 21% in the group receiving chemotherapy alone. Traditional cancer treatments involve radiation to destroy the DNA of cancer cells. These cancer cells use PARP enzymes to fight back the chemo and repair the damaged DNA. BSI-201 attempts to defeat this process by blocking the enzymes and not allowing the cancerous cells to repair themselves. Women who received BSI-201 had a median progression-free survival of 6.9 months and overall survival of 9.2 months compared with 3.3 and 5.7 months, respectively, for women who received chemotherapy alone. "These results represent an important development for a disease that currently has no approved standard of treatment,'' said Barry Sherman, M.D., BiPar's Executive Vice President of Development. "Further study of BSI-201 will help us determine its full therapeutic potential in triple-negative breast cancer, as well as in other cancers.''

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