by Lee Krug, MD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
This month, a notification was sent to investigators on the DETERMINE Trial that accrual will be completed by the end of October. DETERMINE is an international, randomized trial comparing treatment with an immunotherapy drug called tremelimumab to treatment with placebo as second or third line therapy in patients with malignant mesothelioma. The trial opened in May, 2013, and in just 17 months will have enrolled 564 patients! This is a notable achievement. To put this in perspective, the last phase III of this magnitude testing vorinostat in a comparable group of patients (VANTAGE Trial) took 5 1/2 years to enroll 660 patients. There are differences between these two trials that could have accounted, in part, to the more rapid accrual. In DETERMINE, 2/3 of the patients receive the study drug, 1/3 get placebo, while in VANTAGE it was half and half. Also, immunotherapy drugs such as tremelimumab have garnered tremendous excitement in the oncology field due to their promising results in numerous cancers such as melanoma skin cancer and lung cancer. Yet, despite these differences, this accomplishment of completing a trial of this size in such a short period of time should be a wake-up call to the pharmaceutical industry. Historically, drug companies have been reluctant to undertake large trials in mesothelioma due to concerns about feasibility and slow accrual. But this trial demonstrates the potential. Patients with mesothelioma urgently need better treatments, and with only one chemotherapy regimen approved, there is a tremendous opportunity to impact the outcomes for these patients. So here is the message to pharma: Large trials in mesothelioma are possible, and the community of patients with mesothelioma is eager to participate.
Lee M. Krug, MD, is an Associate Attending Physician in the Division of Thoracic Oncology, Department of Medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, New York where he completed a fellowship and chief fellowship in medical oncology. Dr. Krug is the Director of the Mesothelioma Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Read more about Dr. Krug’s work here.
