A trial looking at gemcitabine and carboplatin for advanced ovarian cancer (OII)

Cancer type:

Ovarian cancer

Status:

Results

Phase:

Phase 2

This trial was looking at gemcitabine together with carboplatin for ovarian cancer that had come back after treatment.

More about this trial

Doctors often treat ovarian cancer with platinum chemotherapy drugs such as carboplatin or cisplatin. These drugs sometimes work well, but some ovarian cancers are platinum resistant. This means either the treatment doesn’t work, or the cancer starts to grow again a few weeks or months later.

Platinum resistant ovarian cancer can be hard to treat. There are other chemotherapy drugs that doctors can use, but they often don’t work very well.

Research has shown that giving gemcitabine with carboplatin can work better than carboplatin alone. Doctors can already use this combination to treat ovarian cancer that has come back, if the cancer responds well to platinum chemotherapy drugs.

The researchers thought that this combination may also be useful for platinum resistant ovarian cancer. But they were not sure.

The aims of this trial were to find out

How well gemcitabine and carboplatin worked for advanced platinum resistant ovarian cancer
About the side effects

Summary of results

The researchers found that having gemcitabine with carboplatin worked well for people with advanced platinum resistant ovarian cancer.

This trial recruited 40 people. Everyone had gemcitabine and carboplatin.

The ovarian cancer responded to treatment in 18 of the 40 people.

The average amount of time people lived after treatment was just under 12 months.

The most common side effects were

A drop in blood cells causing an increased risk of infection
Feeling or being sick
Tiredness

The research team concluded that gemcitabine with carboplatin worked well for people with ovarian cancer. And that this combination should be studied further as a treatment for ovarian cancer.

We have based this summary on information from the team who ran the trial. The information they sent us has been reviewed by independent specialists (peer reviewed Open a glossary item ) and published in a medical journal. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team. We have not analysed the data ourselves.