New treatment shows promise against recurrent gynecologic cancers.

April 21, 2009 - (BRONX, NY) - Recurrent and metastatic endometrial and ovarian cancers can be notoriously difficult to treat: They have spread to other organs and typically have developed resistance to chemotherapy; and patients already heavily treated with chemotherapy may not be able to endure more chemo. Now, physicians at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have shown that a combination of two chemotherapy drugs not only produced clinical benefit for such patients but were also well tolerated. The findings are published online in the journal Gynecologic Oncology (see also Albert Einstein College of Medicine).

"Women with recurrent gynecologic cancers have often had multiple rounds of chemotherapy, which can cause tumor cells to develop resistance to these drugs," says Mark H. Einstein, M.D., associate professor of obstetrics & gynecology and women's health at Einstein, who headed the study. "This resistance can make it difficult for doctors to devise a treatment protocol that will impact the cancers while avoiding the often-severe side effects that certain chemotherapy drugs can cause, particularly when patients have already been heavily pretreated with other anti-cancer drugs."

In previous clinical studies, the chemotherapy drugs topotecan and docetaxel showed effectiveness when used separately against recurrent gynecologic cancers. The phase 2 trial conducted by Dr. Einstein and his colleaguesthe first to evaluate the combination of the ...