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Patient-Tailored Treatment Guided by State-of-the-Art Fusion Imaging More than Doubles the Survival Outcome of Women with Advanced Breast Cancer

Roseville, MN. In the Late Breaking Research Session of the 96^th annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, AACR, Dr. Fatih Uckun, M.D., and colleagues from Parker Hughes Cancer Center and Parker Hughes Clinics reported the results of patient tailored treatments in 89 women with advanced breast cancer.  Seventy-seven of these 89 patients had failed other treatments and had recurrent Stage IV metastatic breast cancer.  All treatments were administered in an outpatient setting.  Patient tailored treatments were guided by state-of-the-art fusion imaging which combines high resolution anatomic imaging using CT/MRI scans, with functional/molecular imaging using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging.  This approach lead to the early identification of unexpected treatment failures and timely switch to more effective treatments.  Kaplan Meier analysis was performed to estimate the median survival and 95% confidence intervals (CI).

Remarkably, failure to respond to a particular regimen did not preclude objective responses to a different regimen.  No single treatment regimen was found to be consistently effective, emphasizing the importance of tailoring treatment to each patient and prompting sequential administration of alternative treatments as soon as a treatment was found to be ineffective.  The median survival time of 89 patients was 23 months (95% CI=19-42 months) with an estimated one-year survival probability of 73% and a 2-year survival probability of 48%.  Thirty-five (45%) remain alive at a median of 24 months.  Twenty-six (74%) of these 35 patients have lived more than one year with 15 patients (43%) remaining alive more than two years. (Ranges: 28-48 months).  “Our results show that a significant portion of Stage IV breast cancer patients can live long term,” said Dr. Uckun, lead author of the paper that was presented on April 19, 2005 at the AACR annual meeting in Anaheim California.

The 23-month average survival of the Parker Hughes patients with advanced breast cancer who received a patient tailored treatment as an outpatient in a clinic setting is 109% longer than the average survival time of 11 months obtained in a meta-analysis of six published multicenter clinical trials involving 957 patients with metastatic or relapsed breast cancer.  These results confirm and extend recent reports of similar improvements in treatment outcomes for patients with advanced colon cancer, as well as patients with advanced pancreas cancer, achieved through the patient tailored treatment programs of Parker Hughes Cancer Center as presented at the recent GI Malignancy Symposium of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, ASCO, on January 28, 2005.

 References:

1. Patient-tailored outpatient chemotherapy regimens for advanced breast cancer.  Meeting: 96^th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research-Late Breaking Research Session  Abstract #LB-162 First Author: F. Uckun

2. Patient-tailored outpatient chemotherapy regimens for inoperable advanced metastatic pancreas cancer. Meeting: 2005 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium   Abstract No: 89   First Author: F. Uckun

3. Patient-tailored outpatient chemotherapy regimens for metastatic colorectal cancer. Meeting: 2005 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium   Abstract No: 176   First Author: F. Uckun.