A trial looking at onartuzumab with chemotherapy for HER2 negative cancer of the stomach or where the stomach meets the oesophagus (METGastric)

Cancer type:

Oesophageal cancer

Stomach cancer

Status:

Results

Phase:

Phase 3

This trial looked at the combination of onartuzumab and chemotherapy. It was for people with either:

stomach cancer, or
cancer in the area where the food pipe (oesophagus) meets the stomach – the gastro oesophageal junction

It was for people whose cancer had spread to another part of the body and who had only small amounts of a protein called HER2. This is called HER2 negative Open a glossary item .

The trial was open for people to join between 2012 and 2014. The team published the results in 2017.

More about this trial

When this trial was done, doctors usually used chemotherapy to treat stomach cancer that had spread to other parts of the body. In this trial, they wanted to see if having onartuzumab as well was useful.

Onartuzumab (MetMab) is a type of targeted treatment called a monoclonal antibody. It targets a receptor Open a glossary item called Met that is found on some cancer cells.

The people taking part were put into 1 of 2 treatment groups at random:

half had chemotherapy and onartuzumab
half had chemotherapy and a dummy drug (placebo)

The main aims of the trial were to find out:

if onartuzumab and chemotherapy is better than chemotherapy alone for this group of patients
more about the side effects

Summary of results

As part of our editorial policy, any trial information we write is checked externally before we put it on our website. The research team have published some results for this trial. But we have been unable to find anyone involved with the trial to check the summary for us.

This means we are not able to include a plain English summary of the results on this page.

More information
There is more information about this trial in the link to the medical journal below.

Please note, the information we link to here is not in plain English. It has been written for healthcare professionals and researchers.

Effect of Fluorouracil, Leucovorin, and Oxaliplatin With or Without Onartuzumab in HER2-Negative, MET-Positive Gastroesophageal Adenocarcinoma: The METGastric Randomized Clinical Trial
M Shah and others
JAMA Oncology, 2017. Volume 3, issue 5, pages 620 – 627.