Autologous Bone Marrow Transplantation - Blog Science Connections

540 Panel Discussion: Session VI
sarcoma is 100%, the response rate in rhabdo is about 90%. Although we
didn't do it in a randomized fashion, I think there is in fact a dose-response
curve in induction.
DR. DICKE: Right, but your long-term survival rate is only 20%.
DR. R. HERZIC: The long-term survival rate of the Ewing's sarcoma
patients is about 50%. Now, if you look at metastatic patients with Ewing's
sarcoma in the published trials, their survival rate is 30%, but if you look at
those patients, a lot of them had isolated metastatic disease in the lungs,
which yields reasonable response rates and reasonable durations of response.
If you look at patients with bone and bone marrow disease, they have almost
uniformly died. The majority of patients in our trial had bone and bone
marrow disease, and they are doing better than in previous trials, but I don't
know that it's worth jumping to.
DR. DICKE: DO you think it is already time to do a randomized trial
between a high-dose regimen versus normal-dose chemotherapy in one of
the sarcomas?
DR. R. HERZIG: NO, 1 guess that was my final sentence. 1 don't think we
ought to use this strategy without a little more development. Is 50% good
enough in that group before trying to come up with a better regimen? If you
had a high-dose regimen to randomize, what high-dose regimen would it be?
I'd like a better one before we did the randomized trial.