Study Warns Against Use of VEGF Inhibitors in Advanced Kidney Cancer

Findings from a federally funded study suggest that patients with locally advanced kidney cancer should not be treated with either adjuvant (post-surgery) sorafenib or sunitinib. The average period to disease recurrence was similar between those who received sorafenib or sunitinib after surgery (5.6 years) and those treated with placebo (5.7 years). The study will be presented at the upcoming 2015 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in Orlando.

These drugs didn’t reduce disease recurrence, but on average they did not appear to worsen patient outcomes either,” said lead study author Naomi B. Haas, MD, an associate professor of medicine at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “We are still analyzing the various groups of patients enrolled on this trial, and we hope that analysis of patient specimens collected on this study may provide clues into subsets of patients who might still benefit from these therapies.”

Sorafenib and sunitinib are VEGF inhibitors, a class of drugs that work by blocking the growth of blood vessels to the tumor. They are widely used for the treatment of metastatic kidney cancer.

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Source: ASCO