Malignant pleural mesothelioma: review and analysis of clinical studies presented at ASCO 2015
Accepted: 11 July 2016
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Introduction: 21 studies on pleural mesothelioma were presented at ASCO 2015. Of these the most clinically relevant are two phase III medical therapy studies, NGR015 and MAPS. NGR015 compared patients treated with NGR-hTNF vs placebo in combination with best investigator choice (BIC) chemotherapy. MAPS compared patients treated with pemetrexed+cisplatin+bevacizumab vs pemetrexed+cisplatin. Methods: This article describes the results of the two studies and briefly reports on other studies of interest in this disease. Results: In NGR015 the primary endpoint was not achieved, but survival (OS) and progression-free interval (PFS) of patients with short free interval after first-line treatment were interesting. In MAPS the addition of bevacizumab showed an increase in both PFS (9.59 vs 7.48 months) and OS (18.82 vs 16.07 months). Conclusion: In recent years there has been growing excitement in the study of mesothelioma, which in the clinic translates into the possibility of combining chemotherapy with new anti-vascular and anti-angiogenetic drugs that can prolong survival in subgroups of patients.
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