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Cancer Resources > Cancer News > Cancer News from Reuters > Reuters Cancer News > 2006 > November
Drug combo effective for kidney cancer
Last Updated: 2006-11-09 9:22:33 -0400 (Reuters Health)
LONDON (Reuters) - Treating patients with advanced kidney cancer before surgery with a combination of targeted therapies is safe, effective and may prolong their lives, researchers said on Thursday.
Scientists at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre, who presented their findings at a conference in Prague, studied the effect of bevacizumab and erlotinib in given before a patient's tumour was removed.
"The main aim of this study was to look at the efficacy and safety of using these targeted therapies before surgery; and our results have shown that there were few side effects and that it prolonged the survival of our patients," said Dr. Eric Jonasch, a professor of medicine at the University of Texas.
Other studies have focused on the impact of giving the drug combo to patients after surgery but Jonasch and his team said their trial of 20 patients is the first to investigate the pre-surgical effect.
Bevacizumab, which is sold under the name Avastin, was developed by U.S. biotech group Genentech and its partner Roche Holding AG. It is an anti-angiogenesis drug which starves the tumour of blood supply.
Erlotinib, which is marketed by Roche as Tarceva, is a drug that blocks a signal which tells cells to divide.
"Our findings indicate that this treatment approach might be applicable to a wide range of patients with renal cell carcinoma and that we might be able to use systemic treatment, before surgery, to treat many more people with metastatic disease successfully," Dr. Jonasch said in a statement.
The patients received bevacizumab intravenously once every two weeks for four weeks and took erlotinib orally every day for eight weeks before they had surgery.
Most of the 190,000 kidney cancer cases diagnosed each year are in developed countries, and the disease is twice as common in men than in women. If the cancer has metastasized to the lymph nodes or other organs, the 5-year survival is very low.
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