Friday, August 8, 2008

New chemo protocol?

A poster at Sarcoma Alliance reports her husband's success with a chemo protocol that I had never heard of before. It sounds unbelievably difficult, but he had a good response despite widespread disease:

My husband Steve was diagnosed with epitheliod sarcoma in November 2007 and presented with over 50 spots on his legs , sides and back. He was told initially by his doctor, Dr. Lei chen, that he had a less than 10% chance or survival rate for more than 30 months. We were devastated. He is 35 years old and we have 3 kids. He was experiencing a stomache ache and before they would start any treatment they made him have a full physical. They did a CT scan on his stomache and found that the cancer had created vascular invasion and he had to have a mesenteric bypass. It was a huge operation!! That prolonged any treatement for the cancer for 2 months while he recovered. He then started chemotherapy and we were asked if he would be willing to try an experimental cocktail, and we of course said yes after the diagnosis we got. He just finished his 6th round and he now has only 12 spots on the PET with nothing bigger than 2 mm. The doctors are amazed at his response!! The cocktail he recieved was temodar in pill form 325 mg. worth for seven days along with cisplatin through i.v. the first three days and then a week later one i.v. dose doxil. He has been told recently that he cannot have any more chemo for "a while." He is now waiting to see if he can go on study for a maintenance drug that would hold the cancer right where it is for now in hopes that it won't grow until he can have chemo again. The only problem is that he has a 50% chance of getting a placebo. He wants to continue with the chemo but his Dr. is insisting that he can't. Please let me know if anyone has any knowledge of anything else that is working for this type of cancer.
I believe he is being treated at the University of Utah. If anyone has any insights on where they should go from here, I'm sure she'd appreciate thoughts in the original thread.

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