Monday 19, Oct 2009
Survival rate increased with Avastin in recurrent glioblastoma affected patients
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According to a recent study that was conduced at 11 centers across the country and published in the early online version of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, survival rate gets increased with Avastin in recurrent glioblastoma affected patients. It was revealed during the study that the targeted therapy Avastin, alone or in combination with CPT-11 (chemotherapy drug) can considerably increase progression-free survival times and survival rates in patients with a deadly form of recurrent brain cancer.
Dr. Timothy Cloughesy, director of the Neuro-Oncology Program at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and senior author of the study said that positive results from Avastin have promoted the FDA to an accelerated approval of Avastin in May 2009 for use in patients with recurrent glioblastomas.
From News-Medical.Net:
Cloughesy believes the study shows the apparent power of Avastin when used alone in treating deadly brain cancers for which few effective treatments now exist.
“I think what this tells us is that the majority of the effects we’re seeing are due to the Avastin,” he said.
In addition, Avastin was well tolerated. While some serious side effects were noted - brain hemorrhage, strokes and heart attacks - they were seen in a very small number of patients. Avastin also appeared to reduce brain swelling, allowing patients to significantly lower the steroid dose they had to take, eliminating a number of debilitating side effects.
“Because their brain swelling went down and they could lower their doses of steroids, some patients saw a marked improvement in function,” Cloughesy said.
About 20,000 patients will be diagnosed with glioblastoma this year, of those 14,000 will die.
The last new systemic therapy for recurrent glioblastoma was approved in 1976. Until Avastin, all other experimental therapies tested in this type of cancer failed to meet the FDA guidelines for approval. It’s vital that less toxic, more effective therapies are found to fight glioblastoma, Cloughesy said, both when it recurs and when it is first diagnosed. Studies are underway now to see if the study results can be validated in patients with newly diagnosed glioblastomas.
Avastin is an angiogenesis inhibitor that neutralizes VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor), which is a chemical signal stimulating the growth of new blood vessels and has already been approved for use in metastatic colorectal, breast, and kidney cancers as well as non-small cell lung cancer.
Tags: Avastin, brain cancer, chemotherapy drug, CPT-11, glioblastoma, lung cancer, steroid dose, steroids, vascular endothelial growth factor
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