FDA's decision on Avastin will take away choice for many patients, says Breastcancer.

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Dr. Marisa Weiss, president and founder of Breastcancer.org and a breast oncologist in the Philadelphia area submitted a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration prior to the Oncology Drug Advisory Committee (ODAC) meeting to review data for Avastin's use in metastatic HER2-negative breast cancer. In light of today's news that the FDA has recommended removing Avastin's approval to treat breast cancer, Breastcancer.org is making public Dr. Weiss' ODAC letter in its entirety.

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Dr. Robert Nagourney is medical and laboratory director at Rational Therapeutics, Inc., in Long Beach, California, and an instructor of Pharmacology at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Medical Oncology and Hematology. His take on this Avastin controversy is interesting.

There are no perfect drugs. There are simply drugs that work for certain patients. VEGF down-regulation is an attractive and highly appropriate therapy for a subset of cancer patients with many different diagnoses whose tumors use the VEGF pathway to their advantage. Avastin combined with carboplatin and taxol has improved the survival of lung cancer patients. Avastin plus folfox has improved survival for colon cancer patients. Avastin plus chemotherapy improves the survival of some breast cancer patients. The problem is that it doesn't improve the survival of all breast cancer patients.

When the FDA rules on the clinical utility of a drug, they use a broad-brush approach that looks at the global outcomes of all patients, determining whether these glacial trends reflect a true climate change. The problem is that while Bethesda, Maryland may not be noticing significant changes in ocean levels, people who live on the Maldives are having a very different experience. As these scientists ponder the significance of Avastin, some breast cancer patients are missing out on a treatment that could quite possibly save their lives.

One breast cancer patient's life saving therapy is another's pulmonary embolism without clinical benefit. Until such time as cancer patients are selected for therapies predicated upon their own unique biology, we will confront one Avastin after another. Our solution to this problem has been to investigate the VEGF targeting agents in each individual patient's tissue culture, alone and in combination with other drugs, to gauge the likelihood that vascular targeting will favorably influence each patient's outcome. Our results to date in patients with non-small cell lung cancer, colorectal cancer and even rare tumors (like medullary carcinoma of the thyroid) suggest this to be a highly productive direction for future development.