Adding Erbitux to First Line Chemotherapy Helps Advanced Colorectal Cancer Patients with Wild Type KRAS

Does adding Erbitux to chemotherapy help people whose colorectal cancer has spread beyond the colon or rectum to distant body sites?

The answer is yes, according to a pooled analysis of two large randomized clinical trials comparing chemotherapy alone to chemotherapy plus Erbitux® (cetuximab).  However, benefits depend on whether or not patient tumors have mutations of two genes, KRAS and BRAF.

Previous studies have shown that only patients with normal or wild type KRAS get any benefit from EGFR inhibitors Erbitux or Vectibix™ (panitumumab) so a combined analysis of the CRYSTAL and OPUS studies looked only a outcomes in KRAS wild type tumors.  In addition, the research team studied the effect of mutations to BRAF.

They found that adding Erbitux to initial chemotherapy improved overall survival time, time until cancers got worse (progression-free survival), the percent of tumors that shrank with treatment (overall response rate) for tumors with wild-type KRAS.  The best outcomes were in patients who had both wild-type KRAS and wild-type BRAF. Continue reading…

Posted by Kate Murphy on June 15th, 2010
Posted in: Research & Treatment News | No Comments »
Tags: BRAF mutations, cetuximab, colorectal cancer prognosis, Erbitux, KRAS mutations, metastatic colorectal cancer

No Benefit Adding Cetuximab to Chemo for Stage III Colon Cancer

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. Continue reading…

Posted by Kate Murphy on June 10th, 2010
Posted in: Research & Treatment News | No Comments »
Tags: cetuximab, clinical trials, Erbitux, stage III colon cancer

Erbitux Plus Chemo Can Make Liver Mets Surgery Possible

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.

Continue reading…

Posted by Kate Murphy on December 14th, 2009
Posted in: Research & Treatment News | No Comments »
Tags: cetuximab, Erbitux, liver metastases

Stage III Cetuximab Trial Closed

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. Continue reading…

Posted by Kate Murphy on December 3rd, 2009
Posted in: Research & Treatment News | No Comments »
Tags: cetuximab, clinical trials, Erbitux

New Data on COIN

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. Continue reading…

Posted by Heinz-Josef Lenz, MD on October 19th, 2009
Posted in: From the Desk of Dr. Lenz | 2 Comments »
Tags: cetuximab, clinical trials, COIN, Erbitux