Induction Versus Adjuvant Gemcitabine/Cisplatin in Locally Advanced Non-metastatic Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma: A Randomized Phase III Trial
The standard of care for locally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma is radical chemoradiation(CRT).Recent advances in radiation techniques and supportive measures resulted in improvemnent of locoregional control and quality of life.However distant failure is still the main challenging reason of poor survival Addition of systemic therapy to concurrent CRT is widely used and accepted as an option to reduce these failures ,however selection of chemotherapy regimen and timing in relation to CRT is controversial. Doublet and triplet chemotherapy regimens using cisplatin and 5FU are throughly investigated in this setting.Inspite of significant improvement in disease free survival and overall survival they were poorly tolerated.Hence,minority of patients in the daily practice could tolerate those studied regimens as propsed. Recently, in multicenter randomized trial, Zhang and his group investigated gemcitabine and cisplatin as induction chemotherapy (ICT) added to CRT.It showed improvement in recurrence free survival and overall survival.More importantly 96.7% of the experimental arm completed the treatment protocol. This was further confirmed by an updated network of meta analysis by Bongiovanni et al.Again the question of when is still valid.Our proposal is to compare tolerable regimen in induction versus adjuvant settings.
• Patients with newly histologically confirmed Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (according to World Health Organization (WHO) 2. The patient has stage III except T3N0 or IVA disease (according to 8th American Joint Committee on Cancer staging system) 3. WHO performance status 0-1 . 4. The patient must have achieved lawful age to provide informed consent according to local or national law .
• 5\. Laboratory values performed within 14 days prior to concurrent chemotherapy should be as follows: i) Absolute neutrophil count (ANC) ≥ 1500/mm ii) Platelet count ≥ 100.000/mm iii) Hemoglobin ≥ 8g/dl iv) Urea and serum creatinine ≤ 1.5 mg/dl. (for cisplatin) v) Creatinine clearance ≥ 60 ml/min. (for cisplatin) vi) SGOT and SGPT ≤ 2 × upper limit of laboratory normal 6. Female participants of childbearing potential must have a negative urine or serum pregnancy test within 72 hours prior to receiving the first dose of study therapy