We give that with a drug called mesna which protects the bladder from the side effects of the chemotherapy. The standard drug chemotherapy involves usually two drugs, one’s called doxorubicin or called adriamycin and another drug called ifosfamide or Ifex. We give a lot of chemotherapy for sarcoma. That drug does have some activity in one of those two sarcoma subtypes, the leiomyosarcoma in fact dacarbazine works, I would say, in about 10% of those patients but has never really been tested in the liposarcoma setting but it was used as the control arm of this randomised clinical trial. They compared it to a very old drug called dacarbazine, or DTIC, which has been around for about 20-25 years. We’re not really sure exactly how the drug works in sarcoma but that’s the putative target for the drug. So it was a randomised clinical trial of this drug called eribulin by Eisai Pharmaceuticals which targets, they say, the microtubule that’s part of what we call the spindle of the dividing cancer cell. What is your take on what was discovered in the study? To be a sarcoma doctor, in fact, you have to know just not one cancer, sarcoma, you have to know about fifty different cancers to be a sarcoma specialist. So that’s the complexity of the sarcoma field. We also call these liposarcomas, which are cancers of the fat and actually people were very surprised that fat can become malignant and, yes, you can get malignancies of the fat called liposarcomas, of which in fact there are several types of those as well. The ones that are focussed in this particular abstract that will be presented today at ASCO are two subtypes of sarcoma, one is leiomyosarcoma, which are cancers of the muscle, and the other is called adipocyte tumours and that has to be a little bit clarified. You can imagine every soft tissue element in the body can develop into a cancer, believe it or not. The complexity of sarcoma, in fact, is that there are fifty different subtypes of sarcoma. In the United States we’ll see about 14,000 connective tissue cancers a year, making it really an orphan disease. When we usually speak about cancer we talk about carcinomas which are organ cancers, sarcomas are the connected tissue cancers. What are the challenges of sarcoma? What were the investigators trying to do? Prof Gary Schwartz - Columbia University, New York, USA Comment: Eribulin extends overall survival for advanced liposarcoma and leiomyosarcoma
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