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