ung cancer patients given amrubicin (Calsed) as a second-line treatment had a significantly improved response rate and longer progression-free survival than patients treated with topotecan (Hycamtin), as per research presented at the 14th World Conference on Lung Cancer in Amsterdam, hosted by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC).
“Amrubicin showed significant improvements in tumor shrinkage, symptom control and progression-free survival over topotecan without improving overall survival, the primary endpoint of the trial,” said principal investigator Dr. Joachim von Pawel, of the Asklepios Hospital Munich-Gauting in Gera number of. “However, for patients with the most difficult-to-treat small cell lung cancer, amrubicin offered an improvement in overall survival compared with topotecan.”
Second-line therapy is given to patients after the initial, or first-line, therapy has failed.
In the study, 637 patients were randomized to amrubicin or to topotecan. Patients on amrubicin reported better symptom control and quality of life (Lung Cancer Symptom Scale 0.2 vs 5.6 and LCSS-SB -0.1 vs 5.2 for amrubicin and topotecan, respectively). They also reported fewer adverse events, including neutropenia (41% vs 53% for the topotecan arm), thrombocytopenia (21% vs 54%), anemia (16% vs 30%), infections (16% vs 10%), febrile neutropenia (10% vs 4%), all P<0.05, and cardiac disorders (5% vs 5%; P=0.84)………
Thalidomide as adjuvant therapy for HCC
Thalidomide has shown potential to be used as the first adjuvant treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), as per data presented at the International Liver CongressTM 2011.1.
A newly released study found thalidomide gave HCC patients who’d undergone grossly curative resection surgical removal of the malignant part of the liver double the two-year disease free survival rate (65%) in comparison to placebo (33%).
However, the study did find that the two-year overall survival rate was comparable between patients treated with thalidomide and patients given placebo � 84.2% and 85.7% respectively.
Daniele Prati, EASL’s Scientific Committee Member and Press Committee Chairman, commented: “Current options for adjuvant treatment in HCC are very limited and clinical trial results have been disappointing. Thalidomide has already been proven to work well in many other areas and this study shows it could potentially benefit HCC patients who are especially difficult to treat. Overall, it is important to continue research in evaluating adjuvant treatment in HCC”.
Surgery is the main form of therapy for HCC, but is only possible for a small proportion of those afflicted. Even after curative resection, recurrence is common and is the main cause of death. Adjuvant treatment that is, chemotherapy after surgery � is thus attempted to try to improve outcomes.2………
Digoxin may be a possible treatment for prostate cancer
Researchers have identified digoxin as a possible treatment for prostate cancer, using a combination of laboratory science and epidemiology that is unprecedented in its cooperative nature.
“Epidemiologists and basic researchers often do not understand each other, as we often are only clear on our own strengths and the other’s weaknesses,” said Elizabeth Platz, Sc.D., M.P.H, professor of epidemiology and the Martin D. Abeloff, M.D., scholar in cancer prevention at Johns Hopkins University.
For the current paper, published in Cancer Discovery, the newest journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, which will debut at the AACR 102nd Annual Meeting 2011, Platz shares authorship with Srinivasan Yegnasubramanian, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins. Platz said the multidisciplinary team of researchers had come together to identify existing drugs that could be used to treat prostate cancer in a process called drug repositioning.
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“If you use drugs that are already available then you have a long history of safety research that does not necessarily need to be redone, and we can move more quickly to testing whether the drug will actually work in a new setting,” said Platz.
The idea of drug repositioning has been offered before, but each branch of scientific inquiry had enough flaws that it had not previously gained substantial traction. “When we combined the basic science and the epidemiology approaches, the flaws were not the same and were covered by their respective strengths,” she said………
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