Bevacizumab is effective in ovary cancer
Bevacizumab appears to be effective in the treatment of patients with ovarian cancer as per the emerging data. Bevacizumab is shown to be active as a single agent or in combination with chemotherapy in patients with ovarian cancer as per a recent two separate phase II trial presented at the American Society of Oncology (ASCO) meeting held in May 2005 (Abstracts 5000 and 5009).
Both these trial showed responses and improvement in progression free survival at six months from the start of the treatment compared to historical controls. In one of the studies presented (Gynecologic Oncology Group study – GOG 170-D) researchers evaluated the efficiency of mono-therapy using bevacizumab in patients who had recurrence of ovarian cancer. Sixty-two patients were enrolled in to this study and 48 of these patients had stage IIC ovarian cancer and the rest had stage IIIA to stage IV disease. At the time of presentation 48 patients had discontinued therapy, two patients because of toxicity and the rest due to disease progression and one patient for unspecified reasons. Three patients (4.8%) achieved complete remission and 8 patients (12.9%) had partial response. Additional 34 (54.8%) patients had stable disease. Median duration of response was 10.25 months and median progression free survival at six months was 38.7%.
In a second phase II study, researchers at Women’s Breast Cancer Research Institute at Cedar-Sinai Medical center at Los Angles tested the combination of bevacizumab and low-dose chemotherapy consisting of cyclophosphamide in patients with ovarian cancer. Researchers used a metronomic dosing for the chemotherapy, in which the patients received daily low doses of cyclophosphamide. This dosage schedule was chosen because of some evidence from previous work to suggest that this dosing schedule is associated with anti-angiogenic activity. In preclinical model a combination of bevacizumab and metronomic cyclophosphamide completely stopped all tumor growth. This trial was conducted in two stages with an initial enrolment of 29 patients followed by a second stage with enrolment of 66 patients. This presentation only gave details of 29 patients who were enrolled in the first stage of enrolment.
