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NYU School of Medicine
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NYU Physicians Available to Comment on the use of IP Chemotherapy for Ovarian Cancer

NEW YORK, January 4, 2006 — Doctors at NYU Medical Center are available to comment on intraperitoneal (IP) administration of chemotherapy as the first line of treatment for ovarian cancer, which a new study shows can significantly prolong the lives of women with advanced ovarian cancer. The IP method delivers drugs directly into the abdomen. NYU medical oncologists and gynecologic oncologists have been using IP chemotherapy in various treatment regimens since the 1980s.

The new study is published in the January 5, 2006, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. It reports the results of a large clinical trial in which women were randomly assigned to receive a combination of IP and intravenous (IV) chemotherapy following surgery to remove their cancer or only IV chemotherapy after surgery. The IP arm of the study extended median survival by 16 months. Half of the women in the IP treatment arm lived 5.5 years or longer while the median survival of those in the IV arm was slightly more than four years.

"For patients with advanced ovarian cancer, it is a huge treatment advance," says John Curtin, M.D., Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. "For most advanced cancers, two or three months of added life are considered good. So the results of this study are really remarkable. It looks like this form of chemotherapy should become the standard therapy for patients with advanced cancer."

Franco Muggia, M.D., the Anne Murnick Cogan and David H. Cogan Professor of Oncology, says: "This is a somewhat startling result, which clearly supports the advantage of IP drug delivery over standard IV approaches."

Dr. Muggia conducted early clinical trials of IP chemotherapy using the cancer drug cisplatin as "consolidation" therapy. Such treatment was administered after IV therapy to delay the reappearance of ovarian cancer. He continues to use consolidation therapy because many surgeons do not place IP catheters in the abdomen at the time of the initial surgery to remove tumors, a practice that would become less common if IP chemotherapy became widely adopted as first-line treatment.

For many cancers, chemotherapy is administered through venous ports, small devices about the size of a thick quarter, implanted under the skin with an attached catheter, which is placed in a large vein near the heart. Chemotherapy is easier and in some cases safer to deliver to the blood with these devices compared with the intravenous route through a vein in the arm. In contrast, the IP approach involves the use of a similar sized port designed to be inserted into the abdominal cavity. A catheter attached to the port delivers chemotherapy directly into the abdominal cavity allowing prolonged administration of high doses of the drugs directly into the area where the tumor originated.

The latest trial of IP chemotherapy is the third to evaluate the use of the therapy as a first-line treatment for advanced ovarian cancer. When it is used as a first-line treatment, the IP catheter is usually placed into the abdomen at the time of the initial surgery to remove the cancer. Dr. Muggia was part of the Ovarian Committee of the NCI-supported research network named the Gynecologic Oncology Group (GOG). The committee endorsed the trial, which was planned and conducted by the GOG.

Today, many patients with advanced ovarian cancer are treated with IP chemotherapy at NYU Clinical Cancer Center. Drs. Curtin, Muggia, and gynecologic oncologist Stephanie Blank, M.D., can discuss the therapy, including its toxicity, and how it can best be used to have the greatest beneficial impact on patients.

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