The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has expanded the approved use of Stivarga (regorafenib) to treat patients with advanced gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) that cannot be surgically removed and no longer respond to other FDA-approved treatments for this disease.
GIST is a tumor in which cancerous cells form in the tissues of the gastrointestinal tract, part of the body’s digestive system. According to the National Cancer Institute, an estimated 3,300 to 6,000 new cases of GIST occur yearly in the United States, most often in older adults.
“Stivarga is the third drug approved by the FDA to treat gastrointestinal stromal tumors,” said Richard Pazdur, M.D., director of the Office of Hematology and Oncology Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “It provides an important new treatment option for patients with GIST in which other approved drugs are no longer effective.”
Stivarga, a multi-kinase inhibitor, blocks several enzymes that promote cancer growth. With this new approval, Stivarga is intended to be used in patients whose GIST cancer cannot be removed by surgery or has spread to other parts of the body (metastatic) and is no longer responding to Gleevec (imatinib) and Sutent (sunitinib), two other FDA-approved drugs to treat GIST.
The safety and effectiveness of Stivarga for this use were evaluated in a clinical study of 199 patients with GIST that could not be surgically removed and progressed after treatment with Gleevec or Sutent. Results showed patients who took Stivarga had a delay in tumor growth (progression-free survival) that was, on average, 4 months later than patients who were given placebo. Patients who received a placebo during the trial were given the opportunity to switch to Stivarga when their cancer progressed.
The most common side effects reported in patients treated with Stivarga were weakness and fatigue, hand-foot syndrome (also called palmar-plantar erythrodysesthesia), diarrhea, loss of appetite, high blood pressure, mouth sores, infection, changes in voice volume or quality, pain, weight loss, stomach pain, rash, fever and nausea.
Serious side effects, which occurred in less than one percent of patients, were liver damage, severe bleeding, blistering and peeling of skin, very high blood pressures requiring emergency treatment, heart attacks and perforations (holes) in the intestines.
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