Maintenance Therapy Approved for Lung Cancer

You may have heard of friends on maintenance therapy for other forms of cancer. Now, the FDA has approved the first “maintenance therapy” for lung cancer.

But first. What is maintenance therapy?

Maintenance therapy involves treatment with a chemotherapy drug to keep a cancer from spreading after it has responded to chemotherapy. The chemotherapy drug pemetrexed (Alimta) has now been approved for people with advanced lung cancer who have already completed a course of chemotherapy, and would not otherwise receive further treatment unless their tumors started to grow again. (Alimta is not a new drug, and had previously been approved for mesothelioma, for patients who were getting worse on chemotherapy, and is often used as a first-line treatment for advanced lung cancer combined with another chemotherapy drug.)

Next. The questions I would want answered if I was a lung cancer survivor: Who is a candidate for maintenance therapy for lung cancer? Will maintenance therapy increase my survival rate? Will it have side effects?

Maintenance therapy with Alimta is designed for people with advanced non-small cell lung cancer after they have responded to chemotherapy (usually 4 to 6 rounds of treatment). It is reserved for two types of non-small cell lung cancer; adenocarcinoma and large cell lung cancer. Unfortunately, those with squamous cell lung cancer do not appear to respond to maintenance treatment.

Survival was improved by about 3 months in people who received maintenance therapy with Alimta. Although Alimta has fewer side effects than some of the other medications used in lung cancer, side effects can include:

• Bone marrow suppression
• Fatigue
• Nausea
• Loss of appetite
• Peripheral neuropathy
• Skin rashes

_Source:

_{Food and Drug Administration. FDA News Release. FDA Approves First Maintenance Drug Therapy for Advanced Lung Cancer. Accessed 07/07/09. http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm170515.htm}