Sanofi-Aventis has pulled the curtain back on a slate of promising, late-stage data for its prostate cancer drug cabazitaxel, demonstrating that the therapy prolongs the life of men with advanced tumors.
Reviewing the data scored on 755 men who participated in the study, researchers concluded that patients with treatment resistant tumors lived an average of 15.1 months, 2.4 months longer than the average for men who were treated with chemotherapy.
"This is only the third agent in history to show a survival benefit, so this is huge news for patients," lead author Oliver Sartor, told Bloomberg. "Not only was overall survival better, progression-free survival was better, response rate was better, and virtually every subgroup of patients did better."
Currently, advanced prostate cancer is treated with a therapy to cut off testosterone, which fuels cancer, and is followed by Taxotere. Now cabazitaxel appears poised to become the next drug in that series for hard-to-treat cases. Sanofi says that it plans to wrap its marketing application for the therapy in the first half, which might make it available to patients before the end of the year.
- here's the Bloomberg report
- and here's the story from the New York Times