ESMO 2012 Conference

Vienna, Austria—Costs associated with first-line pemetrexed/cisplatin are significantly lower than those of carboplatin/paclitaxel/bevacizumab for the treatment of advanced non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to an analysis presented at the 2012 European Society for Medical Oncology Congress.

Vienna, Austria—Adding bevacizumab (Avastin) to chemotherapy improves outcomes in patients with platinum-resistant recurrent ovarian cancer, according to results of the phase 3 clinical trial AURELIA, which was presented at the 2012 European Society for Medical Oncology Congress.

Vienna, Austria—In a head-to-head comparison of 2 treatments for meta­static renal-cell carcinoma (mRCC), pazopanib (Votrient) showed similar efficacy to sunitinib (Sutent), with a 1-month survival advantage for sunitinib, which was associated with fewer side effects and an increased quality of life (QOL), suggested Robert J. Motzer, MD, Professor of Medicine, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and an attending physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York.

A review of 34,000 patients with cancer in an insurance claims database showed that during the first 12 months after the diagnosis of cancer, the overall cost of developing venous thromboembolism (VTE) was approximately $100,000 per patient, reported Duke University researchers at the 2012 European Society for Medical Oncology.

Vienna, Austria—Promising preliminary results for 2 novel prostate can-cer drugs—ODM-201 and OGX-427—were reported at the 2012 European Society for Medical Oncology Congress. Both drugs were studied for the treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC).

Vienna, Austria—The updated analyses of 2 major studies of drugs that were recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) confirm the benefits of trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) in patients with advanced HER2-positive breast cancer and of regorafenib (Stivarga) in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC).

Vienna, Austria—In the first head-to-head phase 3 clinical trial, the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) inhibitor crizotinib (Xalkori) proved more effective than standard chemotherapy with pemetrexed (Alimta) or docetaxel (Taxotere) as a second-line treatment for patients with non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and the ALK genetic abnormality.

Vienna, Austria—More support for the continuation of treatment with bevacizumab beyond disease progression in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer was reported at the 2012 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress, validating a small but growing body of pre­vious data.