By Suzanne Rostler
NEW YORK, Jun 28 (Reuters Health) - A combination of two chemotherapy drugs
appears to prolong the lives of patients with high risk for a recurrence of the
deadly skin cancer melanoma, results of a preliminary study suggest.
According to researchers with the University of California at San Diego
(UCSD), tamoxifen, a drug used to treat breast cancer, and cisplatin, another
cancer chemotherapy drug, extended the lives of patients with melanoma who were
at high risk for recurrence.
When diagnosed early, melanoma is curable. But many cases are not diagnosed
with melanoma until the cancer has spread (metastasized), dramatically reducing
the chances for survival and increasing the risk that the cancer will come back,
or recur, after initial treatment.
"If it recurs, it often does so with a much more aggressive and lethal
personality," lead author Dr. Edward F. McClay of the UCSD Cancer Center, said
in a statement. "These statistics, while preliminary, are very encouraging
because we have had precious little to offer patients with metastatic melanoma,"
he added.
The current standard therapy to treat patient with high-risk melanoma is
interferon, a growth factor that stimulates the immune system to seek out and
kill melanoma cells. However, only about 35% of patients who are treated with
interferon survive for five years, McClay told Reuters Health.
His study in the British Journal of Cancer found that 85% of patients were
alive and 68% of patients were free of cancer three years after treatment with
the tamoxifen/cisplatin therapy. Based on these results, researchers predict
that 79% of patients will survive and 62% of patients will not have a tumor
recurrence after five years.
However, it is still not clear how the drug combination works. Alone,
neither drug has proven effective against melanoma, the authors note.
"We haven't finished working out the mechanism but it appears that
tamoxifen stimulates growth factors in many cancer cells which may interact with
cisplatin and makes the cancer cells easier to kill," McClay said.
The researchers treated 153 patients who had undergone surgery to remove
their cancer but remained at risk for recurrence, or whose cancer had already
recurred. Patients received tamoxifen for seven days and on the second day they
received a dose of cisplatin. The week-long regimen was given once a month for
four months.
McClay stressed that researchers will need to conduct larger trials before
the drugs are given to patients with high-risk melanoma outside of clinical
studies.
"If it works, it is going to be huge because it substantially lowers the
death and recurrence rate, but that is what needs to be confirmed," McClay said.
