Category Archives: FDA Meds & Trials

Is the Cheapest Medication the Best for YOU? Or is the Best Medication Cheaper in the Long Run?

kidney cancer

Imagine hearing from your doctor that you must, “Fail first on this cheaper drug. Then I can prescribe a carefully chosen treatment.”

In January of 2019, new Medicare Advantage prescription rules change. Cleverly called “step therapy”, this is a step backwards for our RCC friends with MA plans, undermines the autonomy of doctors, limits timely access to approved medications and may shorten lives of patients given ineffective medication.

“Step therapy” takes treatment recommendations from the doctor and gives it to the bookkeepers looking for savings first. Benefit to patients is likely delayed, while the cancer grows.

With our multiple tumor types, not every medication is right for every patient, their side effects and stage. “Step therapy” is threat to basic and effective care and life-threatening for some.

Before getting the drug thought best for him, the patient must “fail first” before he can “step” to the next. What consitutes a failure?Lack of response, toxicity at a certain level, growth of more mets, and over what period of time? When can the patient go to the more effective drug?

In the long run, this may all Medicare patients, and all insured patients We cannot let this rule stand.

KCCure, on whose board I serve as a Patient Advisor  is one of 239 different organizations which is sending a letter to CMS–the Medicare agency–to protest the change and to explain its impact on us. ( Check www.kccure.org for lots of valuable information on kidney cancer issues.)

Do be aware that you can help by contacting your federal reps, to let them know how dangerous this change can be for all of us. Be prepared to explain that not every patient is the same, nor is every medication. Take a stand for yourself and your fellow patients.

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Lenvima/Lenvatinib with & without Everolimus–New FDA approval

Another new drug for those of us with ‘unresectable and advanced” kidney cancer!  YEA or is is just, yea? What does this mean to the patient in this situation as he struggles to get the best treatment possible?

The approval is for Levatinib in combination with Everolimus (Afinitor) for advanced kidney cancer or unresectable (surgery not possible) kidney cancer in patients who have had previous TKI treatment–Sutent, for example.  This was based on a Phase II trial, so a bit unusual in that regard.  Generally the FDA waits until there is a larger Phase III trial, so this reflects the  need for better second-line treatments.

It is always great to have another tool against kidney cancer, and on top of the recent approval of Nivolumab (Opdivo) and Cabozantinib (Cometryx), but do note that all three are for second line use, after the first line meds have failed.  Current first line drugs include high dose interleukin, Sutent and others.

All the patients in this trial had previously used and quit responding to the first line TKIs, and are compared in three arms

Arm 1)  Lenvatinib alone–52 patients—didn’t make the grade

Arm 2) Everolimus alone–51 patients—standard of care for second line

Arm 3) Lenvatinib & Everolimus in combo–51 patients–the new approval.

Not a very big trial, so harder to make broad judgements!

Everolimus is already approved for second line use, and Lenvatinib alone was NOT approved except in combination with Everolimus.  With that, just ignore Arm 1.  The big news is that the combo improved median Progression Free Survival (PFS) in the combo to 14.6 months vs 5.5 months with Everolimus. The median gives us the POINT in time at which half got “progressed” on their disease, ie, the damn stuff grew, while the other half had not yet had progression.  Not an average, so half of the combo patients had PFS by 14.6 months, and the other combo half did not have PFS until after that time.

The median Overall Response Rate (ORR) was not very high–but quite typical–and important to understand.  The combo patients had a 37% ORR, so about 1 in 3 had a measurable response.  That compared to just 6% with everolimus.  The most important measure to patients is median Overall Survival. This is usually measured when one-half of a patient group has died, so there are always patients who live beyond that median point. The combo OS was 25.5months vs the Evero alone OS of 15.4 months.  There was no mention I could find whether there were patients alive at this point, but assume there were. Love to know if there are very long term survivors in the combo group, and what makes them more likely to have that response!

In the combo, 29% of the patients discontinued treatment due to side effects and with Everolimus alone, 12% discontinued.  However, both groups had large number of reduced dosages and/or dose interruptions, 89% in the combo group, and 54% in the evero group.  Read: some tough side effects.

The most serious side effect in my opinion was that renal failure occurred in 11% of patients in the combo, 5 of the 51 patients.  Grouping ‘renal impairment with failure”, the combo caused such problems in 18% of those patients, 12% i the evero group. Not good news for those of us with one kidney, so something to be monitorly VERY carefully.

The other ‘usual suspects’ in the side effects in the combo were hypertension 42% vs 10%, diarrhea 81% vs 19%.  Not surprising was a fairly high rate of ‘hemorrhagic events”, ie, bleeding problems in both groups, 32% vs 26%. And more.

Again, not easy, better than no treatments,or using everolimus alone.  All these meds demand good communication with the treating team and patients.  Sadly missing in this trial and in every other one is any real guidance as to which patients might best respond to this combo. Neither is there a neat comparison to the second-line use of Nivo or Cabo.  Practice, practice, and be aware of your own health issues as to side effect potential as you look at these trials and your own situation.

http://www.multivu.com/players/English/7690031-eisai-lenvima-fda-2/  for the company’s review and videos by Dr. Sumanta Pal at the City of Hope and a spokemans from Esai.

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Filed under Clinical Trials, FDA Meds & Trials, Medications, Patient Resources, Targeted Therapies, Therapies

Recurrence? Is There an App for That–or a Medicine?

Being diagnosed with kidney cancer is a stunner.  Facing surgery and endless, oft unanswered questions changes your life.  Patients with small tumors, easily removed, are often told not to worry about it coming back.  Of course, there is ALWAYS the possibility that even small “I got it all tumors” can recur.  Sadly, the current guidelines fail to catch about 30% of recurrences, using the 2013, 2014 guidelines.  These guidelines were from an earlier era, where there were fewer small tumors found, so there was data lacking on long-term follow-up.

We patients ask? “Why not just take the meds that the patients with metastatic disease do?  Wouldn’t that prevent it from coming back?  If it works to fight the mets, why wouldn’t it prevent new ones from getting a foothold? “

Why not use the meds that they use now against metastatic disease? Why wouldn’t that work?  Have they tested that idea?

In February of 2015, a study was released which comparing patient response to 1) sunitinib (Sutent),2) sorafenib (Nexavar), or 3) placebo (no real medicine).  This  three-arm study included 1,943 patients who had locally advanced clear cell and non-clear cell histology RCCs. They were thought to be at high-risk for recurrence of their cancer, and might benefit from “adjuvant” therapy.  The researchers hoped that they would see a 25% improvement in time to recurrence of disease with the meds vs no meds.. That would means that the typical 5.8 years median Disease Free Survival (DFS) would go to 7.7 years.

Sadly, there was no benefit to taking the active drugs compared to the placebo.  More sad is that the patients had side effects associated with the drug, referred to as “adverse events”. In fact, many dropped out of the active agent arms into the placebo arm, certainly knowing that the med they were taking were anti-cancer meds.  Those “adverse events”, severe fatigue, hypertension or hand-foot reactions, were observed in those taking the active agents and rarely in the placebo patients.

The median time on the drugs was 8 months.  That means half the patients  were on drugs more than 8 months and half were on the drugs less than 8 months.  Even those patients starting with lower doses of the drugs fared worse than the placebo group.

Despite taking the medications and enduring the side effects, the recurrence was about the same.   With medication or without, these patients, as groups, did the same.  Those taking the meds had Disease Free Survival of 5.6 or 5.7 years, similar to those not taking any real meds.  There was no real added benefit to these patients.  Certainly the quality of the life was affected by the side effects, and the constant reminder of the spectre of more cancer.

What can patients learn from this study?

The fear of recurrence is real. After all, the expected time until the disease progressed (love using that term for cancer!), was about 5 1/2 years.  These patients were carefully monitored with CTs on a regular basis, which caught their recurrences as soon as possible. Had they not been in this trial, it is reasonable to expect that many would not have received those scans and not know of the recurrence as it happened.

The reality is that the typical patient may or may not continue to be monitored. Even those who passed the 5 1/2 year mark without recurrence may not realize that RCC can come back.  Again, 30% of recurrences in small, non-metastatic disease are not caught.  One can assume that the higher risk group in this trial would also be at risk for that level of recurrence.

Take-home message: At present, nothing has been shown to prevent recurrence of this locally advanced disease. Even the non-metastatic small tumors that have sent out invisible “wanna-be mets”, and no one can yet guess who is at the most risk.

The best approach is to monitor yourself and your general health and to demand CT scans, especially in the lungs, where metastatic RCC is most likely to start.  That does NOT mean an x-ray, as those mets would have to be about 1/4″ in order to be seen.  My own lung mets were under that size when first found, but there were hundreds of them, and they grew quickly.  Not visible on an x-ray, but growing every day.

Despite the disappointing study above, the ASSURE study, more clinical trials are recruiting patients for similar studies using drugs that have already been shown to be less active than those in the ASSURE study.  I would be cautious in getting into such a trial, and would spend my energies seeing that my monitoring is extended at least until 10 years past my surgery–even with those “got it all” primary tumors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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