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Cancer Drug More Effective in Women Than Men

Posted on: Friday, 17 February 2006, 06:00 CST

A new study by Seattle-based biopharmaceutical Cell Therapeutics has confirmed results of previous studies that its lung cancer treatment, Xyotax, is more effective in women than men due to the female sex steroid estrogen.

Updated results of a phase II study of Xyotax in combination with carboplatin among 35 women and 39 men with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) confirmed the findings of previous trials that women performed better than men. Only patients with poor performance status (PS2) were enrolled in the first trials, whereas there was no restriction on performance status in this phase II trial, known as PGT202.

The study was analyzed for overall survival by gender and by estrogen levels to confirm the observation of enhanced efficacy in the presence of estrogen seen in the initial first-line trials. Estimated one-year survival of women receiving Xyotax was 36% compared to only 16% of their male counterparts.

Furthermore, those women who had normal estrogen levels survived longer than the post-menopausal women with low estrogen levels. The estimated median survival for women with low estrogen was 128 days while the median survival among women with normal estrogen levels was 218 days. At the time of last contact, nine of 12 women (75%) with normal estrogen levels were alive compared to nine of 22 women (41%) with low estrogen levels.

Source: Datamonitor

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