I'm starting a new thread on Erbitux & HPV since I caved in too easily to the guesswork of other posters in my earlier thread. I had concluded that I was just in the unlucky 5% that Erbitux does not work for. My MO disagreed today.
At my visit with my Medical Oncologist today at the Lombardi Cancer Center (a CCC)at Georgetown Hospital, we had an extensive discussion on the new and disturbing evidence that using Erbitux alone leads to recurrence more often than cisplatin or carboplatin for HPV tumors in Stage 3 or 4 with lymph node involvement. He said there are studies due to come out soon from Europe and Chicago that will document this.
Based on the analysis of the CCC's patients records as well as discussions with other MOs in Chicago and other treatment centers, he has discontinued administering Erbitux to any of his head and neck cancer patients with HPV and lymph node involvement. It's the majority of patients, not just 5%, that are having recurrences after Erbitux alone treatment.
We discussed how the all the info in 2007 (Bonner) indicated Erbitux was made for HPV treatment, yet the clinical data is not supporting that hope. He was sorry that the information available now was not available then when I decided to gamble on Erbitux. He is unwilling to risk his patients' health waiting for the Erbitux clinical trial results to be done. He pointed out the studies that show the best results such as Extreme were those where the patients did not receive Erbitux alone but in conjunction with platinum based chemotherapy.
Now this is just one medical oncologist's opinion, but he keeps up with the literature and networks. He has found no difference between carboplatin and cisplatin in results so I will do my carboplatin infusion tomorrow.
I will follow up with him on getting specifics so I can post any articles or studies (in addition to the one study from the OCF news that triggered my first thread) when they are published. Remember it was also a big surprise when Erbitux turned out not to work in 40% of colorectal cancer patients.
Charm