Sorafenib with Transarterial Chemoembolization Achieves Improved Survival vs. Sorafenib Alone in Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study

By Victor Kok FEATURING Victor Kok

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October 10, 2019

In 2018 alone, liver cancer took the lives of 781,631 people (CA: A Cancer Journal ...
read more ↘ for Clinicians, 2018). Unfortunately, doctors don’t have many treatments for advanced liver cancer. There is a drug called sorafenib that improves patient survival by several months and is widely used, but given the modest improvement, it’s understandable that scientists want to find some way of making the drug more effective.
One way to do this, researchers thought, was to add another type of treatment on top of sorafenib. This treatment is transarterial chemoembolization (TACE), a scary-sounding procedure that involves cutting off blood supply to a malignant tumor, depriving it of oxygen and nutrients. Some research suggests show that TACE could improve survival in patients with liver cancer when it is added to sorafenib treatment, but other studies have found no difference in survival.
To figure out exactly what the science is on this issue, senior scientist Dr Victor Kok—Medical Director at Kuang Tien General Hospital Cancer Center, Taiwan—and fellow researchers from universities and hospitals across Taiwan and Japan decided to work together on a cohort study (one that follows a group of people with a similar condition over time). They investigated patients with liver cancer who were treated either with sorafenib alone, or with sorafenib plus TACE. The patients were pulled from a large database containing nearly the entire population of Taiwan, making this the largest nation-wide, population-based cohort study on the topic of TACE add-on therapy.
The results? Dr Kok and his colleagues reported an encouraging finding and success: overall, 26% more patients survived under the sorafenib+TACE treatment than under sorafenib alone. Comparisons between the two treatment groups eliminated the effect of factors like differences in age, sex, and other characteristics that might influence survival outcome. This means the scientists are pretty confident that the improved overall survival was due to adding TACE. So, the study by Dr Kok pushes the medical community to develop better treatment strategies for liver cancer and suggests that sorafenib+TACE be recommended to patients.
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Sorafenib with Transarterial Chemoembolization Achieves Improved Survival vs. Sorafenib Alone in Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study

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