Search

PDF file - 46K, Patient Demographics and Disease Characteristics.

Recombinant interleukin (IL)-18 (SB-485232) is an immunostimulatory cytokine, with shown antitumor activity in combination with pegylated liposomal doxorubicin (PLD) in preclinical models. This phase I study evaluated the safety, tolerability, and biologic activity of SB-485232 administered in combination with PLD in subjects with recurrent ovarian cancer. The protocol comprised four cycles of PLD (40 mg/m2) on day 1 every 28 days, in combination with SB-485232 at increasing doses (1, 3, 10, 30, and 100 μg/kg) on days 2 and 9 of each cycle, to be administered over five subject cohorts, followed by discretionary PLD monotherapy. Sixteen subjects were enrolled. One subject withdrew due to PLD hypersensitivity. Most subjects (82%) were platinum-resistant or refractory, and had received a median of three or more prior chemotherapy regimens. SB-485232 up to 100 μg/kg with PLD had an acceptable safety profile. Common drug-related adverse events were grade 1 or 2 (no grade 4 or 5 adverse events). Concomitant PLD administration did not attenuate the biologic activity of IL-18, with maximal SB-485232 biologic activity already observed at 3 μg/kg. Ten of 16 enrolled subjects (63%) completed treatment, whereas five (31%) subjects progressed on treatment. A 6% partial objective response rate and a 38% stable disease rate were observed. We provide pilot data suggesting that SB-485232 at the 3 μg/kg dose level in combination with PLD is safe and biologically active. This combination warrants further study in a phase II trial. Cancer Immunol Res; 1(3); 168–78. ©2013 AACR.

This article, using Mocombeian phenomenological structural theory, argues that since their arrival on North American soil, the constitution of black American identity has been the product of their relations to the means and mode of production within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. As such, black Americans, and this includes the so-called black radical tradition, have never been agents in the constitution of their own identities. They have always been and remain (reactionary) pawns of capital seeking, dialectically or negative dialectically, to assimilate in the American social structure. Their assimilation takes place within the social practices of two social class language games (the black bourgeoisie and the underclass) that were historically constituted by different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, respectively, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced African ideological apparatuses as found in Haiti, for example. Contemporarily, given both groups’ overrepresentation in the ideological superstructures of the American empire, they, antagonistically, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for all black youth the world-over, especially in the United Kingdom, which have tremendous consequences for their assimilation process. Under the assimilationist imperatives of the black bourgeoisie, the aim is integration and assimilation along the lines of traditional white Protestant agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism with an emphasis on bourgeois prosperity, the black nuclear family, entrepreneurialism, and individualism. Conversely, the black underclass seeks integration and assimilation through the pathologies of their structural differentiation within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism with an emphasis on identity politics, glorification of the self, wealth via sports and entertainment, and the communal thinking of the street life as the basis of black identity and culture.