The treatment is a combination of two cancer-killing drugs that can be taken orally as pills, making it easier on those patients who have already undergone difficult surgery, radiation or traditional, intravenous chemotherapy.
"It's not a miracle, but it's a piece of the struggle against brain cancer," says David N. Korones, M.D., principal investigator and associate professor of Pediatrics, Oncology, and Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. "It's a new, somewhat innovative approach that has merit and offers better tolerance than traditional chemotherapy. It makes life much easier for these patients. Patients can stay home and simply take a pill, instead of coming into the hospital for several hours to be tethered to an IV."
Korones is the first to investigate the effectiveness of temozolomide and etoposide, given together for patients with recurrent malignant glioma, the most common brain tumor in adults. Each of the drugs, which have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, has been used separately with some success. But Korones noticed that laboratory data showed synergies between the two medications, and he theorized they may work better in tandem.
Among the 24 adult patients he has followed so far, 16 percent saw their tumors shrink and 35 percent were stable with no disease progression after six months, compared to 10-20 percent of patients who stabilize after traditional chemotherapy. The results are encouraging, he says; the median survival time for brain cancer that
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Contact: Leslie Orr
leslie_orr@urmc.rochester.edu
585-275-5774
University of Rochester Medical Center
21-Aug-2003