Drug helps people with lung cancer to survive longer

CHICAGO — Erbitux lengthened the survival of patients with advanced lung cancer by about five weeks, researchers reported this weekend.

Doctors said the effect of the drug, however modest, was somewhat significant because many other drugs had failed to prolong the lives of lung-cancer patients.

"It's a very moderate gain but it's a positive step in the world's No. 1 cause of cancer death," said Dr. Roy Herbst of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study but has been a consultant to the drug's manufacturer. Herbst said, "It's not a home run, it's just a single."

The Erbitux study was perhaps the major focus of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which began Friday.

In another study, researchers reported that a drug used to treat patients whose cancer has spread to the bone can also help prevent a recurrence of breast cancer in younger women.

Erbitux, which is approved to treat colon cancer and head and neck cancer, was developed by ImClone Systems of New York.

The drug, also known as cetuximab, is sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb and ImClone in the United States and abroad by Merck of Germany.

While the companies previously announced that Erbitux increased survival of lung-cancer patients, the question not answered until now was: by how much?

The trial, sponsored by Merck, involved 1,125 patients with non-small-cell cancer. In almost all of them, the cancer had spread outside the lungs.

Those who received Erbitux plus chemotherapy lived a median of 11.3 months, compared with 10.1 months for those who received chemotherapy alone. The difference was statistically significant.

A study on breast cancer involved the drug zoledronic acid, sold as Zometa by Novartis.

It is one of a class of drugs called bisphosphonates that are used to treat osteoporosis, though Zometa is mainly used to treat cancer that has spread to the bone.

The trial, conducted by an academic group in Austria, enrolled 1,800 women who had had surgery to remove their tumors. The women were premenopausal and were receiving hormone therapy — either tamoxifen or anastrozole — to prevent recurrence of their tumors. Half the women also received Zometa.

After five years, about 6 percent of the patients who received Zometa had a recurrence of cancer or had died, compared with 9 percent of those who did not. The relative reduction in risk was about 35 percent.

Dr. Hyman Muss of the University of Vermont, who was not part of the study, said Zometa would be an option. But he said many women might opt to forgo Zometa because of concerns about a side effect — a rotting of the jaw bones — that has been associated with Zometa and some similar drugs.

Also, last year, a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that patients given Zometa, which is injected once a year, were more than twice as likely to develop serious atrial fibrillation compared with those given a placebo.

Material from The Seattle Times archives is included in this report.