Drug Combination Found To Increase Prostate Cancer Survival Rates

Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston have found that men with widely spread prostate cancer that were treated with docetaxel in combination with standard hormone therapy lived 58 months, while men who were not treated with the drug lived only 44 months.

Docetaxel is a chemotherapy drug known as Taxotere in generic form, which has been available for decades. The drug is affordable and readily available to cancer patients. While newer cancer drugs can cost up to $100,000 for a full course of treatment, generic docetaxel only costs $1,500 per infusion, and sometimes less.

“This is one of the biggest improvements we've seen in survival in adults" with any type of cancer that has widely spread from its original site,” said Dr. Christopher Sweeney, who led the research and presented the results at the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago on Sunday.

Prostate cancer is the most likely form of cancer that men will contract. It’s estimated that there are 240,000 new cases of prostate cancer diagnosed in the U.S. each year. It is believed that 30,000 men each year have prostate cancer that has spread to other regions of the body, including the bones or other organs. Once the cancer spreads, it is much more difficult to treat and becomes a more dire health problem.

The study involved 790 patients, all of whom received drugs to block testosterone. Half of the patients also received six infusions of docetaxel over the course of three weeks. Of those patients taking docetaxel, 101 had passed away 2 ½ years later compared to 136 of those not taking the drug.   

The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute and took about ten years to complete. Dr. Clifford Hudis, who works at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said that federal funding was central to the study, and that similar studies likely would not be completed if it weren’t for federal funding. “These are often studies that industry is less interested in funding, such as a new use for an old drug that lost patent protection long ago,” Hudis said.