Improving survival rates of head and neck cancers

Athanassos Argiris, MD, of the Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA, talks about the results from a Phase III trial for patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck cancer (NCT00588770). Two therapeutic options were looked at. One option was a standard treatment with chemotherapy using doublet regimens of platinum and the other was to give the doublet in combination with bevacizumab, an antibody against VEGF. It was hypothesized that by targeting VEGF with bevacizumab, the survival of those patients could be improved. Dr Argiris explains that the results of the study showed that the addition of bevacizumab improves progression free survival and response rate and results in an improvement in overall survival.
Recorded at the American Society of Oncology (ASCO) 2017 Annual Meeting held in Chicago, IL.