Cetuximab is an EGFR mAb.
Cetuximab is a fairly new treatment for throat(laryngeal) cancer.
Cetuximab is in a class of drugs best thought of as“targeted therapy.”.
Cetuximab in combination with FOLFOX or FOLFIRI is recommended for the first-line treatment
of metastatic colorectal cancer only when all of the following criteria are met:[14].
The drug Cetuximab(Erbitux) is just the first of a new
kind of cancer drug recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for head and neck cancers.
Cetuximab has moved from clinical trials into more mainstream treatment plans,
and although I would not consider it experimental, it is not a“magic bullet” for cancer either.
The patient is fit enough to undergo surgery to resect the primary colorectal tumour and
to undergo liver surgery if the metastases become resectable after treatment with Cetuximab.
With the assumption that patients with mutated Kras(35.6% of all patients) would not receive Cetuximab(other studies have found Kras mutation
in up to 46% of patients), theoretical drug cost savings would be $753 million;
At the 2008 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, researchers announced that colorectal cancer patients that have a mutation in the KRAS gene do not respond to certain therapies, those that inhibit the
epidermal growth factor receptor(EGFR)--namely Erbitux(Cetuximab) and Vectibix(panitumumab).