Better treatment for rare bone cancer
The world's largest study into a rare type of bone cancer is making good progress, an international cancer conference has been told. EURAMOS (European and American Osteosarcoma Study Group) is a clinical trial which brings together groups from 11 European countries, as well as the US and Canada, to improve the treatment of people suffering from osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. So far over 300 patients have been enrolled in the trial, and the project is on course to recruit 1,400 patients during the next few years. The trial is funded by the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) programme on pan-European clinical trials. With 2-3 million cases a year, osteosarcoma is a relatively rare cancer which mostly affects teenagers and young adults. The causes of the disease are not fully understood, but it is thought to arise as a result of disturbances in normal bone growth. It can be cured; treatment usually consists of a course of chemotherapy to shrink the tumour before it is surgically removed. After surgery the patient undergoes a further course of chemotherapy. However, treatment is not always successful. In particular, those who do not respond well to the first round of chemotherapy tend to have a lower chance of surviving the disease. The aim of the EURAMOS trial is to improve treatments for all patients, and in particular they hope to see whether survival rates can be improved for those who respond poorly to chemotherapy. Speaking at the Pan European Sarcoma Trials conference in Stuttgart, EURAMOS Coordinator Stefan Bielack underlined the importance of international collaboration for his project. 'While sarcomas are rare, accounting for less than 1% of all cancers, they are some of the most frequent that occur in childhood and adolescence,' he commented. 'Treatment is complex and collaboration between many centres and different countries is crucial.' The conference heard that the new EU regulations governing clinical trials had caused some difficulties for EURAMOS, but that the project partners had successfully overcome these. 'The EU regulations were designed to promote better research and protect the subjects,' Dr Heribert Jürgens of the German Society for Paediatric Oncology and Haematology told the conference. 'We have to accept and apply them, and establish centralised structures and standardised procedures.' 'EURAMOS has succeeded in overcoming the hurdles imposed by the implementation of the EU Clinical Trials Directive and the experience gathered throughout the launch of this trial can be used as a model to pave the way for further pan-European academic clinical trials in the future,' added Dr Mariana Resnicoff, coordinator of the ESF EUROCORES medical sciences programme. The conference also heard of many new advances in the diagnosis and treatment of sarcomas, from molecular genetic techniques to determine precisely which type of cancer was present, to the latest radiotherapy technologies and new methods for removing secondary tumours from the lung with lasers.
Countries
Canada, United States