(Press-News.org) The results of a large Phase-III clinical trial have shown that the drug everolimus delays tumor progression in patients with a hard-to-treat group of rare cancers that affect particular hormone-producing cells.
At the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), Dr Marianne Pavel from Charité University in Berlin, Germany reported that everolimus improved progression-free survival by 5.1 months in patients with advanced neuroendocrine tumors.
Neuroendocrine tumors are slow-growing malignancies that originate from cells of the body's neuroendocrine system. These cells are found throughout the body in organs such as the gastrointestinal tract and the lungs. The tumors are mostly non-responsive to chemotherapy drugs. They affect less than five people in 100,000, and until now there have been few treatment options for inhibition of tumor growth.
In the new RADIANT-2 trial, researchers in several European countries and the USA treated 429 patients with progressing, well- or moderately-differentiated advanced neuroendocrine tumors with either everolimus plus a somatostatin analog called octreotide LAR, or placebo plus octreotide LAR.
All patients had a history of 'carcinoid' symptoms, meaning the tumors have been secreting excessive levels of amines, especially serotonin, leading to symptoms such as flushing and diarrhea. The tumor originated in the small intestine in about 50% of patients.
Overall, the median progression-free survival for patients given everolimus plus octreotide LAR was 16.4 months, significantly longer than the median 11.3 months for placebo plus octreotide LAR, Dr Pavel reported.
"This is the first Phase-III trial of the combination therapy with octreotide LAR and everolimus and it is the largest trial that has ever been done in this type of neuroendocrine tumors," Dr Pavel said. "When we designed the study, we tested for an improvement of at least 4.5 months compared to octreotide LAR and were pleased with the resulting 5.1 month difference."
Currently, treatment options for neuroendocrine tumors are limited. Chemotherapy is only effective in neuroendocrine tumors affecting the pancreas. For tumors that originate in other organs, treatments include somatostatin analogs that control symptoms related to over-secretion of compounds such as serotonin. Interferon-alpha is also approved for these types of neuroendocrine tumors which are also referred to as carcinoid tumors. A placebo-controlled trial recently demonstrated that octreotide LAR has anti-tumor effects in neuroendocrine tumors of the small intestine.
"Since chemotherapeutic drugs are not effective in this type of neuroendocrine tumor patient, we now have for the first time a drug that has been studied in a Phase-III trial that offers antitumor efficacy in addition to the currently available agents, somatostatin analogs and interferon," Dr Pavel said.
"I think the drug will be further explored in this type of tumor. It seems important to identify patients that may benefit most from the combination of everolimus and octreotide LAR compared to octreotide LAR alone."
Dr Roberto Labianca from Ospedali Riuniti di Bergamo, Italy, commented: "This large Phase III trial in a rare tumor shows that everolimus is able to increase the efficacy of octreotide LAR, at the present time the standard treatment for advanced neuroendocrine tumors."
"This trial should be considered a practice-changing achievement but it is essential that selection criteria are refined in order to identify the population more likely to respond to this approach," Dr Labianca said. "Further trials in this field are needed, preferably in the frame of a large cooperative collaboration."
INFORMATION: END
A new class of compounds identified by researchers at Emory University School of Medicine could be developed into drugs for the treatment of schizophrenia. The compounds enhance signaling by molecules in the brain called NMDA receptors, which scientists believe are functioning at low levels in people with schizophrenia.
Led by Stephen Traynelis, PhD, professor of pharmacology, a team of Emory researchers sifted through thousands of chemicals and found one, called CIQ, which could selectively enhance the function of certain NMDA receptors without affecting others.
The ...
Iowa City, IA—October 11, 2010— A new study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology finds that college-aged men are very likely to remember a woman's initial sexual interest (attraction or rejection), especially when the woman in question is thought to be attractive, is dressed more provocatively, and expresses positive sexual interest.
In the study the men were shown full-body photographs of college-aged women who expressed cues of sexual interest or rejection. The participating males represented mixed sexual histories, and a capacity for varying degrees of sexually ...
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- University of Florida researchers presenting new fossil evidence of an exceptionally well-preserved 55-million-year-old North American mammal have found it shares a common ancestor with rodents and primates, including humans.The study published today in the online edition of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, describes the cranial anatomy of the extinct mammal, Labidolemur kayi.
High resolution CT scans of the specimens allowed researchers to study minute details in the skull, including bone structures smaller than one-tenth of a millimeter. ...
The genetic inherited material DNA was long viewed as the sole bearer of hereditary information. The function of its packaging proteins, the histones, was believed to be exclusively structural. Additional genetic information can be stored, however, and passed on to subsequent generations through chemical changes in the DNA or histones. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen have succeeded in creating an experimental system for testing the function of such chemical histone modifications and their influence on the organism. Chemical ...
More brilliant X-rays, more cost-effective methods for developing new energy sources and advanced manufacturing processes are just some of the benefits which may come from a novel technology, proven at the theoretical level by a consortium of British and European laser scientists. The research, led by scientists at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Central Laser Facility is published in this week's edition of Nature Physics (October 10 2010).
A team of scientists from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Imperial College London, and the Universities ...
A University of Colorado at Boulder space dust counter designed, tested and operated by students that is flying aboard NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto now holds the record for the most distant working dust detector ever to travel through space.
The instrument on the New Horizons mission -- officially named the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, or SDC, after an 11-year-old English girl who named Pluto more than 75 years ago -- reached a distance of 1.67 billion miles from Earth on Oct. 10. Designed by a student team from CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric ...
Providence, RI---It was a mathematician, Joseph Fourier (1768-1830),
who coined the term "greenhouse effect". That this term, so commonly
used today to describe human effects on the global climate, originated
with a mathematician points to the insights that mathematics can offer
into environmental problems. Three articles in the November 2010
issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society examine ways
in which mathematics can contribute to understanding environmental and
ecological issues.
"Earthquakes and Weatherquakes: Mathematics and Climate Change", ...
Prenatal treatment of congenital toxoplasmosis with antibiotics might substantially reduce the proportion of infected fetuses that develop serious neurological sequelae (brain damage, epilepsy, deafness, blindness, or developmental problems) or die, and could be particularly effective in fetuses whose mothers acquired Toxoplasma gondii, the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis, during the first third of pregnancy. These are the findings of an observational study by Ruth Gilbert from the UCL Institute of Child Health, London, UK, and colleagues and published in this week's ...
Wayne Hall, Rebecca Mathews and Katherine Morley discuss the limitations of genomic risk prediction for population-level preventive health care. Whilst genome-wide association studies and genomic sequencing have the potential to reveal susceptibilities to disease, they sound a note of caution about widescale implementation of such tests. In particular they point out that before genomic information is used in public health screening, it must first be shown that it predicts disease risk better than phenotypic information. They go on to point out that before genomic information ...
In research published this week in PLoS Medicine, Stephen Freedman (University of Toronto) and colleagues performed a cost analysis of the emergency department administration of oral ondansetron to children with dehydration and vomiting secondary to gastroenteritis and found that this treatment could provide substantial economic, as well as clinical, benefit.
The researchers analyzed the costs of the administration of oral ondansetron in both the US and Canada, if routinely given to children with gastroenteritis-induced vomiting and dehydration in the emergency department ...
