Dienstag, 8. Oktober 2013

Oral Artesunate Therapy for Colorectal Cancer

Cheap anti-malaria drug shows promise against colorectal cancer

A Randomised, Double Blind, Placebo-Controlled Pilot Study of Oral Artesunate Therapy for Colorectal Cancer

Medical experts say a common malaria drug could have a significant impact on colorectal cancer providing a cheap adjunct to current expensive chemotherapy
November 18 2014



Cheap anti-malaria drug shows promise against colorectal cancer

"The survival beyond 2 years in the artesunate group was estimated at 91% whilst surviving the first recurrence of cancer in the placebo group was only 57%."


Fig. 4.
Survival recurrence curves predicted by Cox proportional hazards model. Patient CRC21 was assumed to be missing completely at random (please see Supplementary Table 1 for a full sensitivity analysis). In the placebo group 2 patients died within a year (108, 170) days leaving 10 (83%) in the study, another 2 within the next year (383, 663 days) leaving 8 (66%) in the study and the other two died within the third year of the follow up (749 and 990, respectively) leaving 50% patients beyond the third year. The only death in the artesunate group happened after 552 days leaving 9 patients (90%) surviving beyond the third year. These crude estimates support the estimates from the data above.


A Randomised, Double Blind, Placebo-Controlled Pilot Study of Oral Artesunate Therapy for Colorectal Cancer