
“I was keen to go on a clinical trial. I wanted to try new cancer treatments and hopefully help future generations.”
This trial was looking at chemotherapy with doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide followed by ixabepilone or paclitaxel before surgery for breast cancer.
Doctors usually treat early stage breast cancer with surgery. Some women have chemotherapy before surgery. This is called neoadjuvant treatment. It can shrink the cancer in the breast and may mean that you can have surgery to remove just the cancer instead of having the whole breast removed (mastectomy).
Two chemotherapy drugs doctors often use are doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide. In this trial, they looked at adding a third drug. This was either paclitaxel or ixabepilone.
Paclitaxel was a drug that doctors could already use to treat breast cancer. Ixabepilone was a new chemotherapy drug. It works in a similar way to paclitaxel and had already been used in clinical trials for more advanced breast cancer.
The aims of this trial were to
The trial showed that ixabepilone and paclitaxel worked about as well as each other.
The trial recruited women in 15 different countries. All the women taking part had doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide for 12 weeks. They were then put into 1 of 2 groups at random.
The trial team looked at the percentage of women who had no sign of cancer in their breast or in the under their arm after treatment. They found this was very similar in both groups. It was
As the difference is so small, it could have happened by chance so is not .
The side effects were similar in both groups, but more women in the ixabepilone group had a drop in white blood cells that causes an increased risk of infection.
The most common side effect in both groups was numbness and tingling in the hands and feet (peripheral neuropathy).
Women taking part in this trial had a before starting treatment. The researchers used the samples to look for proteins that might show which cancers are more likely to respond to ixabepilone. They could see that cancer responded more often in women who had high levels of one particular protein. But this was the same whichever drug they had. So this would not help doctors work out who would benefit from ixabepilone.
The trial team concluded that neither ixabepilone or paclitaxel after doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide caused bad side effects, but there wasn’t much difference in how well the drugs worked.
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 () and published in a medical journal. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team. We have not analysed the data ourselves.
Please note: In order to join a trial you will need to discuss it with your doctor, unless otherwise specified.
Dr Steve Chan
Bristol-Myers Squibb
Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre (ECMC)
NIHR Clinical Research Network: Cancer
If you have questions about the trial please contact our cancer information nurses
Freephone 0808 800 4040
“I was keen to go on a clinical trial. I wanted to try new cancer treatments and hopefully help future generations.”