According to a presentation by researchers from the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting, adding the drug Zytiga (abiraterone) to standard steroid therapy (prednisone) in men with metastatic prostate cancer doubled progresson-free survival times when compared to steroid therapy alone.
Zytiga proved sufficiently effective in this trial, which involved almost 1,100 men, that investigators halted it before it was designed to be completed in order to give the treatment to the patients who had been randomized to receive steroid therapy and placebo.
The patients in the trial had advanced disease and might or might not have received hormone therapy, but who had not been treated with chemotherapy.
The promise of this trial is that it could change standard treatment guidelines and replace chemotherapy with Zytiga and steroid therapy.
Zytiga's efficacy likely derives from its ability to get into a cancer cell and inhibit the cell's ability to make testosterone. This ability, which a cancer cell develops and uses to survive, is believed to be the reason patients so quickly become resistant to testosterone-blocking therapy.
Currently Zytiga is FDA approved for use in men with prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body and who have already been treated with chemotherapy
Source: ASCO
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