New ovarian cancer drugs raise hope, but not for all (geography/Tesaro/niraparib)

medical news

 June 30, 2016

Promising new therapies are springing up to treat ovarian cancer, long one of the most deadly and hard to treat malignancies.

The latest: An experimental drug from Tesaro, a small biotech company based in Waltham, Mass. The company on Wednesday released exciting clinical trial data for an experimental drug that’s meant to stop cancer cells from repairing themselves after they’ve been hit by chemotherapy.

Patients with recurring ovarian cancer who took the drug got as much as an additional 15 months with no growth in their tumors, as compared to a control group, the company said. The news sent stock prices soaring.

The catch? Even with new drugs, ovarian cancer mortality is likely to remain high.

One reason: Geography.

Patients who aren’t treated at well-trafficked oncology centers tend to receive sub-optimal treatment for this confounding cancer, researchers are showing. They don’t always get therapies that could give them many more months of life. And as drug regimens become more nuanced and complicated, requiring genetic sequencing of tumors, this treatment gap is at risk of growing.....

 “It’ll get worse,” said Dr. Leslie Randall, an associate professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of California, Irvine. “As we come out with more novel treatments that are more complex to deliver, that disparity will only get worse.”