Adding Erbitux® (cetuximab) to standard chemotherapy for stage III colon cancer didn’t improve patient outcomes and added more side effects.

All of the patients in the NO147 trial had cancer that had spread to their lymph nodes and had surgery before beginning chemotherapy. They had normal or wild-type KRAS genes in their tumors.They were randomly assigned to FOLFOX chemotherapy for 6 months or FOLFOX plus Erbitux. 

The trial was closed before the planned number of patients were enrolled because an analysis showed that there was no benefit to the additional Erbitux and continuing the trial would not help patients. Read the rest of this entry »

Chemotherapy and Erbitux® (cetuximab) reduced liver tumors from colorectal cancer enough for patients to have them removed surgically.

Although their cancer was initially too extensive to be surgically removed (resected) chemotherapy combined with Erbitux allowed about a third of patients to have surgery that completely removed all visible signs of liver tumors.  Tumor shrinkage occured in about two out of three patients, despite which chemotherapy was used.

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It doesn’t help patients to add Erbitux to FOLFOX chemotherapy after surgery for stage III colon cancer a data monitoring committee for a clinical trial testing the new treatment has decided.

Because the analysis showed that patients were not benefiting from adding Erbitux to FOLFOX chemotherapy, the trial has been closed according to a news release from the National Cancer Institute. Read the rest of this entry »

At the ECCO/ESMO  meeting in Berlin the data on a large phase III clinical trial from the United Kingdom (COIN) was presented. It was a trial comparing FOLFOX or XELOX in combination with Erbitux.

It is important to know that in the UK Avastin is not approved, and Erbitux was only recently approved in patients with organ limited disease based on the chance of curative resections in patients initially deemed not to be resectable. However it is difficult to judge what the COIN results mean. The response rates in the patients with wild-type KRAS was significantly increased to 64%, so far so good. The problem is that the time to tumor progression and overall survival was not improved in patients with wild-type KRAS and Erbitux therapies. Read the rest of this entry »

Briefly: More colorectal cancer patients experience severe rash from Erbitux than other cancer patients, and significantly more men and younger people have severe rash than women and patients over 70.

Where you live in the United States makes a big difference in your risk of being uninsured from more than 40 percent of people living in Houston to a little more than 3 percent of those in Worchester, MA.

A new method of testing cancer drugs directly on fresh tumor tissue may speed drug development by reducing the need for the earliest human testing. Read the rest of this entry »