A new study by an international team of investigators led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists is the first to demonstrate that chemotherapy and a new, targeted therapy work better in combination than chemotherapy alone in treating patients with the most common genetic subtype of lung cancer. Published online on November 28, 2012 in The Lancet Oncology, the combination of chemotherapy and the targeted drug selumetinib was more effective than chemotherapy alone in a clinical trial involving patients with a form of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that carries a mutation in the gene KRAS – a variety that represents about 20 percent of all NSCLC cases. Previously, no targeted agent, either alone or in combination with another drug, had proven beneficial in a trial involving patients with this type of NSCLC. The 87 patients who participated in the new, phase II trial – conducted at 67 sites around the world – had advanced, KRAS-mutant NSCLC that had failed initial chemotherapy. The participants were randomly assigned to receive either selumetinib and the chemotherapy agent docetaxel or docetaxel alone. Investigators found that while 37 percent of the patients in the selumetinib group experienced some shrinkage of their tumor, none of the patients in the docetaxel-only group did. Of particular significance, patients receiving selumetinib lived a median of 5.3 months before their cancer began to worsen, compared to 2.1 months for those receiving chemotherapy alone. (Patients in the selumetinib group also survived longer, on average, than those in the docetaxel group – 9.4 months compared to 5.2 months – but the improvement was not considered statistically significant.) "Our findings suggest that selumetinib and docetaxel work synergistically – each enhancing the effect of the other," says the study's lead author, Pasi A.Login Or Register To Read Full Story