ATLAS lung cancer trial fails to show survival benefit

Article

Despite touting one year ago that adding Tarceva (erlotinib) to Avastin (bevacizumab) after initial treatment with Avastin extended the time advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients lived without their disease getting worse, researchers have now found the combination did not help patients live longer. The follow-up data were released today at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.CURE first reported on the trial, dubbed ATLAS, at last year's ASCO meeting, but at the time, overall survival data were still to come. In a poster presented at this year's meeting, investigators reported that although the drug combination delayed disease progression for 4.8 months compared with 3.7 months for Avastin alone, no significant difference was seen in how long patients survived (14.4 months for the combination versus 13.3 months for Avastin alone).Researchers said that based on this latest analysis, maintenance therapy with Avastin and Tarceva should not be a standard option for these patients.Read more about the latest options for treating non-small cell lung cancer in "Lung Overdue" from CURE's Spring 2010 issue.Melissa Weber is the former managing editor of CURE and is covering the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

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For patients with cancer, the ongoing chemotherapy shortage may cause some anxiety as they wonder how they will receive their drugs. However, measuring drugs “down to the minutiae of the milligrams” helped patients receive the drugs they needed, said Alison Tray. Tray is an advanced oncology certified nurse practitioner and current vice president of ambulatory operations at Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey. If patients are concerned about getting their cancer drugs, Tray noted that having “an open conversation” between patients and providers is key. “As a provider and a nurse myself, having that conversation, that reassurance and sharing the information is a two-way conversation,” she said. “So just knowing that we're taking care of you, we're going to make sure that you receive the care that you need is the key takeaway.” In June 2023, many patients were unable to receive certain chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin and cisplatin because of an ongoing shortage. By October 2023, experts saw an improvement, although the “ongoing crisis” remained. READ MORE: Patients With Lung Cancer Face Unmet Needs During Drug Shortages “We’re really proud of the work that we could do and achieve that through a critical drug shortage,” Tray said. “None of our patients missed a dose of chemotherapy and we were able to provide that for them.” Tray sat down with CURE® during the 49th Annual Oncology Nursing Society Annual Congress to discuss the ongoing chemo shortage and how patients and care teams approached these challenges. Transcript: Particularly at Hartford HealthCare, when we established this infrastructure, our goal was to make sure that every patient would get the treatment that they need and require, utilizing the data that we have from ASCO guidelines to ensure that we're getting the optimal high-quality standard of care in a timely fashion that we didn't have to delay therapies. So, we were able to do that by going down to the minutiae of the milligrams on hand, particularly when we had a lot of critical drug shortages. So it was really creating that process to really ensure that every patient would get the treatment that they needed. For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, an expert on CLL
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, and Josie Montegaard, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, experts on CLL
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