RUSSIAN ONCOLOGISTS PROPOSED A NEW WAY TO PREVENT CHEMOTHERAPY-INDUCED NAUSEA AND VOMITING

RakFond’s Founder Kristina Zakurdaeva, the study author Alexey Rumyantsev, and CEO of RUSSCO Ilya Tsimafeyeu at ASCO Annual Meeting

Chemotherapy is a cancer treatment type, which uses toxic compounds to kill cancer cells. It also damages healthy cells. This treatment is always associated with adverse events, the common ones being nausea and vomiting, which have an extremely negative impact on the lives of patients and their relatives. That is why effective supportive care is very important in oncology – it maintains the patient’s quality of life and allows to administer anti-cancer treatment in full.

The current standard for treating chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting includes aprepitant; however, it is not available to all patients in Russia due to its high cost. Alexey Rumyantsev, an oncologist in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology and Chemotherapy of N.N. Blokhin National Medical Research Center of Oncology (Moscow, Russia), presented the results of the clinical trial at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, which demonstrated that olanzapine provided higher control of nausea and vomiting with the favorable tolerability profile.

This study was supported by the RUSSCO/RakFond’s Young Scientist & Early Career Investigator Oncology Research Grant.

“The suggested treatment regimen may become a new standard of supportive care for cancer patients who receive chemotherapy,” — Kristina Zakurdaeva, the founder of RakFond, comments, — “Dr. Rumyantsev’s research has been selected for an oral presentation by the Scientific Program Committee from thousands of submitted abstracts, which emphasizes the importance of the obtained results for the international oncology community.”

The abstract of the presentation is available at the ASCO website: http://abstracts.asco.org/239/AbstView_239_264657.html.

---