Shark cartilage no help against lung cancer

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Shark cartilage, once a hopeful-seeming new approach in cancer treatment, failed to help lung cancer patients live any longer, researchers said on Saturday.

Shark cartilage products have been marketed for years as "alternative" products by several firms, and one Canadian company, Aeterna Zentaris Inc., had been developing one such product as a licensed pharmaceutical.

But the large study, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, showed definitively that the product did not work, experts told a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.

The study fits in with several others that have been published in recent years showing that various shark cartilage products do not help cancer patients live any longer, or help ease their symptoms.

"I would like to hope, I would like to pray, that this would put this sort of therapy out of business," Dr. Nancy Davidson, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who is about to become president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said in an interview.

Aeterna Zentaris said in March it had dropped development of its shark cartilage product, Neovastat.

Dr. Charles Lu and colleagues at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston tested 379 lung cancer patients who either drank Neovastat or a product that tasted just like it.

"It is a standard extract of cartilage," Lu said in a telephone interview. Patients would defrost it, drink it at home daily. They did this for more than three years.