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news.GlaxoSmithKline's Bexxar has been shown to rival chemotherapy in treating lymphoma, with 95% of patients responding to the treatment, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
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Bexxar, a new form of treatment for lymphoma that takes a fraction of the time of traditional chemotherapy and with fewer side effects, was evaluated in patients with advanced-stage follicular lymphoma – a cancer generally considered incurable – who had not been previously treated with any other form of therapy.
In the study, patients received a single course of treatment with the Bexxar therapeutic regimen, a radioactive antibody injected into the bloodstream that targets and kills cancer cells. Of the 76 patients enrolled in the study, 95% responded to the treatment and 75% had a complete response, defined as no evidence of cancer remaining.
In addition, more than three-quarters of patients with a complete remission were disease-free after five years.
“The results of this treatment, which essentially takes only one week to complete, rival any kind of treatment that’s been used for follicular lymphoma, including chemotherapy regimens that take months to complete,” said lead study author Dr Mark Kaminski, director of the leukemia/lymphoma program and the Multidisciplinary Lymphoma Clinic at the U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“These results support the notion that there’s a real possibility of putting chemotherapy on the back burner for this disease,” he continued.
Although Bexxar is marketed in the US by GlaxoSmithKline, it was developed by
Kaminski and his colleague, Richard Wahl. The regimen received approval from the FDA in June 2003 to treat follicular non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after other treatments have failed. The newly published research involves Bexxar as a first-line treatment for this disease.
Follicular lymphoma is the second most common type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and is not considered to be curable using traditional treatments; even after patients initially have a response to treatment, the disease almost always returns and becomes more difficult to treat.
Bexxar combines an antibody that seeks out cancer cells, and a radioactive form of the element iodine. When injected, it travels like a guided missile through the bloodstream to bind to a protein found on the surface of the cancerous cells. The radiation zaps these malignant cells with minimal exposure to normal tissues.