Back in 2001, a plan was in the works for a study comparing Erbitux combined with chemotherapy to chemo alone for front-line use.
In stark contrast to ImClone, which rashly tested Erbitux in only 120 patients with no control group, AstraZeneca enrolled 2, 000 patients in late-stage trials to compare how long patients survive on a combination of chemotherapy and Iressa versus chemo and a placebo.
They are also conducting a study comparing their medicine combined with chemotherapy versus a combination of Avastin, panitumumab and chemo.
So far the drug has helped chemotherapy patients survive twice as long as did patients on chemo alone.
But two very large trials combining Iressa with chemotherapy utterly failed to show that Iressa increases survival versus chemo alone.
Standard chemotherapy and Iressa, given together, do not work better than chemo alone.
The technology of immunotherapy, namely Provenge at this time, affords my patients 4 months increased MEDIAN (not average) survival time over the best known chemo regimen, without the morbidity of the side effects of chemotherapy.
At the May cancer conference Genentech was expected to unveil second-stage trial results showing that its antibody in combination with chemotherapy delayed the growth of colon tumors for up to four months compared to chemo alone, and added months to patients' lives.
Encouraging data are also expected this weekend for an approach in which potent doses of chemotherapy are linked to antibody drug such as Roche's Herceptin to deliver chemo more directly to the tumor like a guided missile, to reduce the toxic side effects of chemo.
The Scripps-PARC system may be able to determine whether chemotherapy is working and could indicate when a patient is on the wrong kind of chemo, says Nieva.
For instance, patients who lived long enough to finish all of their prescribed chemotherapy lived about 17 months if they were also taking Affinitak, compared with 14 months if they were taking chemo alone.
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