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Credit: University of Cincinnati
PORTLAND, OR - A first-of-its-kind randomized clinical trial found that patients with pancreatic cancer didn t live any longer than expected after receiving pre-operative chemotherapy from either of the two standard regimens, according to trial results published in
JAMA Oncology.
While the trial findings did not show a direct patient benefit, they do show that it s possible to safely administer chemotherapy prior to pancreatic cancer surgery. They also pave the way for better treatment testing for this notorious killer. With no symptoms in the early stages, and few effective therapies, pancreatic cancer is the fourth-most deadly cancer type in the United States. According to the American Cancer Society, only 20 percent of pancreatic cancer patients are alive one year after diagnosis. After five years, only about 7 percent are alive.
Credit: SWOG Cancer Research Network
Researchers from SWOG Cancer Research Network, a cancer clinical trials group funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, have shown that a triple drug combination - of irinotecan, cetuximab, and vemurafenib - is a more powerful tumor fighter and keeps people with metastatic colon cancer disease free for a significantly longer period of time compared with patients treated with irinotecan and cetuximab.
Results of the SWOG study, led by Scott Kopetz, MD, PhD, of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, are published in the
Journal of Clinical Oncology. The findings are expected to change the standard of care for patients with colorectal cancer that is metastatic - when tumors spread to other parts of the body - and includes a mutation in the BRAF gene called V600E. This mutation is found in about 10 percent of metastatic colorectal cancers and tumors with the mutation rarely responds to treatment, resulting in