New COXEN Model Chooses Best Ovarian Cancer Drug
Currently, doctors use three drugs for treating ovarian cancer. Those drugs are paclitaxel, cyclophosphamide, and topotecan. Doctors usually didn’t know how a patient with ovarian cancer will respond to any of the drugs until treatment is started. A wrong choice could result in a treatment failure with negative effects.
A University of Colorado Cancer Center and University of Virginia study created a complex model that matched patient data to a comprehensive database of former ovarian cancer patients’ genetic and treatment information. The result was a model that can match particular tumors to ovarian cancer drugs that had a higher rate of treatment success. The model is called the COXEN, and patients who received their ovarian cancer drugs through it have lived for an average of 21 months longer than patients who did not. The COXEN model was tested with four relatively large groups of 783 patients each.
Jennifer R. Diamond, MD at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and investigator in the study, believes the model has been a success, “The model allowed us to ask what would have been the right drug in each case, how could we have known from the tumor’s genetics, and what difference it made. We have traditionally considered site-specific cancer to be homogenous – one ovarian cancer is like the next ovarian cancer. But we are increasingly learning that isn’t the case at all. The COXEN model allows us to identify the heterogeneity within the disease. It lets us see why some ovarian cancers respond and others don’t.”