Recruitment open for NABNEC clinical trial, if you have grade 3 Neuroendocrine Carcinoma ask your doctor if you are eligible.
NABNEC, a randomised Phase II clinical trial funded by the NHMRC and supported by Specialised Therapeutics Australia (STA), is now open to patient recruitment. This clinical trial is a study of the combination of nab-Paclitaxel with carboplatin compared with carboplatin in combination with etoposide as treatment for gastrointestinal Neuroendocrine Carcinomas (NECs). It aims to establish if carboplatin and nab-paclitaxel combination is active and tolerable chemotherapy treatment for grade 3 advanced gastrointestinal NECs and also to understand more about the biology of NEC.
Other active Australian sites include Royal North Shore Hospital, Westmead Hospital, Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital, Monash Medical Centre — Moorabbin, Fiona Stanley and Royal Hobart Hospital. Sites still to be activated are located in NSW, VIC, SA and WA. The study aims to recruit 70 patients from 20 sites in Australia.
Neuroendocrine cancers are rare cancers that can develop in different locations throughout the body, including the gastrointestinal tract and the pancreas, with about 500 new cases per year. NECs that have spread around the body (metastasized) or can’t be removed by surgery are incurable with currently available treatments.
The currently available chemotherapy for people with NECs can result in responses of rather short duration (with less than 5% of patients having an overall survival of greater than 5 years). The combination of etoposide with platinum has been used in small cell lung cancer. Due to the lack of clinical trial data in NEC, the platinum etoposide combination has been the mainstay of therapy for NEC. This treatment is the standard treatment arm of NABNEC and the experimental arm is with carboplatin and NAB paclitaxel instead of etoposide. NAB Paclitaxel has shown enhanced activity in other cancers. NABNEC aims to answer some of the important questions regarding the best use of chemotherapy in improving patient outcomes in NEC. It is intended to determine which treatment has the most activity against NECs. If successful, this trial may change practice for patients with NECs. Regardless of the clinical outcomes of the study, the extensive tissue, DNA and blood analysis built into NABNEC will shed light on the biology and increase our understanding of this disease.
