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Hope at last for those with inoperable liver cancer!
The cause of 8,000 deaths each year in France and more than 600,000 deaths worldwide, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) or primary liver cancer was until very recently a neglected disease. There was no reference treatment for it and overall survival rates in the absence of a liver transplant – or rather the lack of donors! – was just a few months.
But good news was announced yesterday afternoon at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago. Professor Josep Llovet’s team (from the Barcelona Liver Cancer Clinic, Spain) made the announcement following a study involving 600 patients in North and South America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
It seems that for the first time a drug – sorafenib (Nexavar) – has made it possible to increase the overall survival of patients suffering from HCC by 44%. Despite this spectacular result, we should not lose sight of the fact that the prognosis for the disease remains terrible. Overall survival in fact varies between 7.9 and 10.4 months. However, as Josep Llovet points out, “given the lack of treatment likely to significantly improve the survival of the thousands of patients affected by liver cancer, these results make Nexavar the first-line reference treatment for HCC.”
Carried out in cooperation with international teams and coordinated with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, this study had to be interrupted before it reached its conclusion precisely because of the quality of the results obtained. The researchers believed that the control group could no longer be deprived of the benefits it offered! These results are naturally giving rise to considerable hope … and have already produced researchers keen to emulate them.
The treatment (2 tablets twice a day) targets both the tumour cells and the blood vessels associated with angiogenesis. It also offers a good tolerance profile, thus giving patients a survival quality incomparable with the situation that prevailed until now. As Dr Julien Taieb (of the Pitié Salpétrière University Hospital in Paris) explained to us, “further studies are also already under way. They will allow us to compare this treatment with molecules of the same family even more recently introduced. It will also be interesting to investigate the role that this drug could play after surgery and to try it in combination with other chemotherapy agents.”
Things could move quickly. The manufacturers of Nexavar –Onyx Pharmaceuticals and BayerHealthCare – have indicated that they are applying for the drug to be extended for use in the treatment of liver cancer. These steps are already under way with the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European authorities (the EMEA).
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