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Takeaways From a Negative Trial in Biliary Tract Cancer

Data from the SWOG 1815 trial presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium showed that adding nab-paclitaxel (Abraxane) to gemcitabine (Gemzar) and cisplatin did not improve progression-free or overall survival for patients with advanced and metastatic biliary tract cancers, but did increase toxicity.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Kristen Spencer, DO, of NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, discusses the findings, including subgroup analyses that suggested a potential benefit for certain patients.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

Today we finally heard the data from the much-awaited abstract, examining gemcitabine, cisplatin, and Abraxane as compared to gemcitabine and cisplatin in first-line biliary tract cancers. This was based off of a phase II study where gemcitabine, cisplatin, and Abraxane had a median overall survival of over 19 months, and was really exciting, and I think held a lot of potential for us to be a practice-changing regimen in the first-line setting for advanced, metastatic biliary tract cancers.

So the study was a randomized study. Essentially patients with advanced metastatic biliary tract cancers were randomized to one of those two arms. And what we found out today was, unfortunately it was a negative study. The triplet regimen did not improve median overall survival or median progression-free survival. Although the regimen did have a bit of a higher response rate, it wasn’t statistically significant. And it also came with a bit of added toxicity.

So I think we were a little disappointed to hear that, but encouragingly they did see improved overall response and outcomes in patients with locally advanced disease and gallbladder cancer. So I think there’s promise to continue to look at this regimen in certain subsets of patients, just like those that I mentioned, perhaps patients that are locally advanced on the borderline of surgery and maybe need a little bit of cytoreduction before they’re eligible for surgery.

Moral of the story is we found out that more is not more, but we still need to figure out who the patients are that might be benefiting from these types of regimens.

  • Greg Laub is the Senior Director of Video and currently leads the video and podcast production teams. Follow

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Source: MedicalNewsToday.com