A trial looking at eribulin and dacarbazine for sarcoma

Cancer type:

Sarcoma

Soft tissue sarcoma

Status:

Results

Phase:

Phase 3

This trial compared the chemotherapy drugs eribulin and dacarbazine for people with soft tissue sarcoma that had come back after treatment.

More about this trial

Soft tissue sarcomas are a type of cancer that start in the supporting tissues of the body, such as muscles, blood vessels, fat and nerves. Doctors usually treat soft tissue sarcoma with surgery and chemotherapy.

Doctors already knew that eribulin (Halaven) could help people with breast cancer that has come back following treatment. But they wanted to see if it could also help people with sarcoma that has come back (recurred).

Dacarbazine is a chemotherapy drug that was already being used to treat soft tissue sarcoma. In this trial, the research team compared eribulin and dacarbazine for people with advanced sarcoma.

The aims of this trial were to find out:

if eribulin is better than dacarbazine for people with soft tissue sarcoma that has come back after chemotherapy
more about the side effects

Summary of results

This trial showed that eribulin worked better than dacarbazine for people with soft tissue sarcoma that had come back after treatment.

Results

This trial recruited more than 450 people with soft tissue sarcoma. Most of the people taking part had either liposarcoma or leiomyosarcoma.

They were put into one of two groups at random, and:

half had eribulin
half had dacarbazine

The research team looked at how long it was before the sarcoma started to grow, and found it was the same in both groups (2.6 months).

But when they looked at how long people lived for, they found there was a difference between the two groups:

13.5 months for those who had eribulin
11.5 months for those who had dacarbazine

Side effects

More than 9 out of 10 people (90%) had at least 1 side effect from treatment. But some of these were mild or didn’t last very long.

Nearly 7 out of 10 people (67%) who had eribulin and nearly 6 out of 10 people (56%) who had dacarbazine had more severe side effects.

The most common side effect was a drop in blood cells. More people who had eribulin had a drop in white blood cells. And more people who had dacarbazine had a drop in red blood cells and clotting cells (platelets). Other side effects included feeling sick and tiredness.

Conclusion

The research team concluded that eribulin helped people with advanced liposarcoma or leiomyosarcoma live longer. They suggest that eribulin could be a useful treatment option for people with soft tissue sarcoma that has come back after treatment.

We have based this summary on information from the research team. 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 who did the research. We have not analysed the data ourselves.