Drug That Helps Metastatic Colon Cancer of No Benefit in Less Advanced Tumors скачать в хорошем качестве

Drug That Helps Metastatic Colon Cancer of No Benefit in Less Advanced Tumors

To the surprise of researchers at Mayo Clinic who led a national clinical trial, a targeted therapy that provides benefit to patients with metastatic colon cancer has failed to help patients with less advanced, stage III cancer. In fact, patients who used the agent, cetuximab, with chemotherapy had outcomes slightly inferior to patients treated with chemotherapy alone. In theory, many of the patients enrolled on this trial should have benefited from the addition of cetuximab to chemotherapy, says Steven Alberts, M.D., the Mayo Clinic oncologist who led the clinical trial. All of the patients enrolled in the trial had colon cancers that had spread to the nearby lymph nodes (stage III), but not beyond. To be eligible for the trial, patients first had to have the cancer completely removed with surgery. These patients also had a normal (wild-type) KRAS gene in their tumor, which previously has been shown necessary to have the potential for cetuximab to work. "The sum of data to date from trials for metastatic colorectal cancer suggested that cetuximab would provide benefit in these stage III patients with KRAS wild-type tumors, and so our findings are unexpected," Dr. Alberts says. "It is difficult to understand how an agent that helps patients with metastatic cancer is not beneficial to those with less advanced disease. At this point we are focusing our efforts on identifying a biological explanation for these findings."