Newly approved med use poses kidney cancer ‘triple threat’
The FDA has just given the green light to another use for a risky chemo drug called Sutent, which is already used to treat cancers of the stomach, bowel, esophagus, and pancreas.
But when an advisory committee met earlier this year to vote whether the use of Sutent could be expanded to “prevent” a return of kidney cancer in those who have had a cancerous kidney removed, six experts turned a big thumb’s down.
Gee, could that be because the warnings on its label read like a horror story? They even acknowledged that patients taking Sutent are three times more likely to have “serious” side effects.
Besides that, they didn’t find the alleged promise of “disease-free survival” very convincing.
But despite the dissent, the agency went ahead anyway.
That means untold numbers of kidney cancer patients are now at a big risk of being prescribed a drug that has been known to triple the chances of tumors spreading throughout their bodies like wildfire.
And that’s an especially cruel joke. Because, as one expert put it, tumors that metastasize are “what kill patients at the end of the day.”
Hear no evil
To hear Pfizer talk about its cancer drug Sutent, you would think that it had just discovered an actual cure for cancer.
Where Sutent is concerned, however, it might be just the opposite. While the med may give the appearance of shrinking tumors, that comes at a very big price.
Five years ago, professor Raghu Kalluri from Harvard Medical School conducted an experiment on mice genetically engineered to have breast cancer.
In the mice given Sutent (also known by its generic name of sunitinib), tumors shrunk by a huge 30 percent in under a month!
But they also started traveling — metastasizing throughout the bodies of those mice at three times the rate experienced by those rodents who didn’t get the drug.
Here’s how it works: Drugs such as Sutent cut off support to blood vessels within a tumor and make it shrink by “damaging” a type of cell called “pericytes.”
But the problem is that when they function properly, those pericytes keep cancer cells in one place! And when they don’t, although a tumor may shrink, the cancer cells go into “fight or flight” mode.
If they can’t survive in the tumor, they look for somewhere else to set up shop and thrive.
Six years ago, when this study was published in the journal Cancer Cell, a flurry of news articles told of the findings. But that was then.
Now, the FDA is only too happy to oblige Pfizer by allowing it a new way to keep the money rolling in from a drug that made the company over a billion dollars last year.
And that’s despite side effects such as: potentially fatal liver damage (which the drug carries a black-box warning for), damage to the heart (including congestive heart failure), hemorrhaging, kidney failure, thyroid “dysfunction,” high blood pressure, and high blood sugar.
Plus that, there’s the risk of a gruesome condition called “osteonecrosis of the jaw,” where the jawbone actually “dies” due to lack of blood, and an equally horrific disorder called “Stevens-Johnson syndrome,” in which your skin literally peels off your body as if you had been boiled in oil.
Seriously, I couldn’t possibly list all the ways Sutent can harm you in this eAlert.
Even the “most common” adverse reactions include fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, and “hand-foot syndrome” — swelling, numbness, and peeling of the skin on the hands and feet.
No matter what kind of cancer you have, Sutent isn’t a cure, as even Pfizer admits. And while the hype on its website paints a glowing picture (between mentions of deadly side effects), everything points to the fact that it’s just too dangerous a med to take under any circumstances.
Certainly having cancer is serious business and not to be taken lightly. But it’s clear that Sutent can quickly take you from the frying pan into the fire.
“Pfizer’s Sutent kidney cancer win should give it a boost, at least until I-O treatments arrive” Eric Palmer, November 17, 2017, FiercePharma, fiercepharma.com
