P53 Based Treatments

P53 has been the direct target of many potential treatments over the years.  The drug Gendicine delivers wild type p53 on an adenoviral vector, and was approved by the China Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of ovarian cancer (Ayen, 2018).  Advexin, a similar drug, was blocked by the FDA in 2008 for reasons that were not officially disclosed (Osborne, 2008). However, it is known that adequate therapeutic effects for trials involving adenoviral delivery of p53 did not exist (Zeimet, 2003).  One logical explanation for this is that p53 is quite upstream in the apoptosis pathway, leaving lots of room for downstream over-amplifications or mutations that allow the tumor to evade apoptosis. There are several ongoing clinical trials in which the p53 gene is inserted via an adenoviral vector (Ayen et al. 2018).  These clinical trials represent the revitalization of p53 based gene therapy, after it was concluded to have failed over a decade ago (Zeimet, 2003).