Advanced colon cancer patients lived twice as long with a Pfizer combo therapy, trial finds

A combination drug treatment doubled survival time for patients with an aggressive form of colorectal cancer, according to late-stage trial data published Friday.

A combination drug treatment doubled survival time for patients with an aggressive form of colorectal cancer, according to late-stage trial data published Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago.

The three-treatment combination included a standard chemotherapy drug, an antibody drug called cetuximab and a pill from Pfizer called Braftovi, which targets a cancer mutation called BRAF V600E.

The mutation shows up in about 10% of patients with colorectal cancer, said Dr. Lionel Kankeu Fonkoua, a gastrointestinal oncologist at the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Rochester, Minnesota. Patients with the mutation tend to survive for less than a year after diagnosis, and they often don’t respond well to standard chemotherapy treatments, said Fonkoua, who wasn’t involved with the new trial.

According to Pfizer, the risk of death for these patients is more than double compared with those without the mutation.

Braftovi was initially approved in 2020 to be used with cetuximab in this group of patients after other treatments had failed. The new trial looked at the drug combination as a so-called first-line therapy.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/advanced-colon-cancer-patients-lived-twice-long-pfizer-combo-therapy-t-rcna209686


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