Adding Erbitux to standard first line treatment for colorectal cancer of CAPOX with Avastin doesn’t help.  In fact, patients who receive the additional agent have a shorter time until their cancer gets worse and have worse side effects.

Results of a randomized phase III clinical trial that added the monoclonal antibody Erbitux® (cetuximab) to Xeloda® (capecitabine), oxaliplatin, and Avastin® (bevacizumab) showed shorter time to cancer progression for patients who got Erbitux in addition to the standard treatment. There was no difference in whether the tumor shrank or overall survival time. Patients who got Erbitux were about 20 percent more likely to have tumors get worse or to die than patients who didn’t.

This was the first chemotherapy treatment for metastatic cancer that these patients were given.  All of them had metastatic tumors that had spread beyond their colons.

While patients with wild-type (normal) KRAS genes in their tumors had longer progression-free time on Erbitux than those with KRAS mutations, that time did not reach the median progression-free interval for patients in the standard treatment group. Read the rest of this entry »