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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- There may be new hope for those suffering with advanced liver cancer, a disease with no effective treatment. Results of a new study show a drug called sorafenib (Nexavar) significantly extended the lives of patients.
Sorafenib is already approved for the treatment of kidney cancer. Testing of the drug was "fast tracked" by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) and has shown promise in previous studies.
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In a controlled trial of more than 500 patients with advanced liver cancer, researchers found patients in the sorafenib group had a median survival of 10.7 months, as compared with 7.9 months in the placebo group.
"Survival rates at one year were 44 percent in the sorafenib group and 33 percent in the placebo group," the authors write. "This significant survival benefit represented a 31 percent relative reduction in the risk of death."
"This trial shows that sorafenib improves overall survival by nearly three months in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma," the authors continue. "This finding is important, given the increasing incidence of the disease around the world and the lack of efficacious therapeutic options in this setting."
SOURCE: New England Journal of Medicine, 2008;359:378-390
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