Japanese Journal of Clinical Oncology Advance Access originally published online on July 15, 2005
Japanese Journal of Clinical Oncology 2005 35(8):439-443; doi:10.1093/jjco/hyi131
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© 2005 Foundation for Promotion of Cancer Research
A Phase II Trial of Uracil–Tegafur (UFT) in Patients with Advanced Biliary Tract Carcinoma
1 Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Oncology Division, National Cancer Center Hospital, Tokyo and 2 Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Oncology Division, National Cancer Center Hospital East, Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan
For reprints and all correspondence: Masafumi Ikeda, Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Oncology Division, National Cancer Center Hospital, 5-1-1 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0045, Japan. E-mail: masikeda{at}ncc.go.jp
Received February 15, 2005; accepted June 12, 2005
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Abstract |
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 TOP Abstract INTRODUCTIONPATIENTS AND METHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONReferences |
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Background: Uracil–tegafur (UFT) has been reported to have broad antitumor activity in a variety of malignancies. However, its activity in biliary tract carcinoma has not been fully evaluated. The aim of this study was to evaluate the antitumor activity and toxicity of UFT in chemotherapy-naive patients with advanced biliary tract carcinoma.
Methods: Nineteen patients with advanced biliary tract carcinoma that was histologically confirmed as adenocarcinoma were enrolled in this phase II trial of UFT. A dose of 360 mg/m2/day of UFT was administered orally if there was no evidence of tumor progression or there was unacceptable toxicity.
Results: Of the 19 patients evaluable for response, one patient (5%) achieved a partial response with a duration of 2.0 months. Six patients (32%) showed no change and the remaining 12 (63%) had progressive disease. The median survival, 6-month survival rate and 1-year survival rate for all patients were 8.8 months, 52.6 and 21.1%, respectively. The chemotherapy was well tolerated, because grades 3 or 4 toxicity were not observed.
Conclusion: UFT appears to have little activity as a single agent in treating patients with advanced biliary tract carcinoma. These findings do not support its use in practice, and further trials with this regimen in patients with biliary tract carcinoma are not recommended.
Key Words: biliary tract carcinoma • chemotherapy • phase II study • uracil–tegafur
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INTRODUCTION |
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TOPAbstractINTRODUCTIONPATIENTS AND METHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONReferences |
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Biliary tract carcinomas (BTCs), including carcinomas that arise from extrahepatic or intrahepatic bile duct, gallbladder or papilla of vater, are relatively rare tumors with a dismal prognosis. Surgical resection is the first choice of treatment for BTC and usually provides the only chance for a cure. However, because of the absence of early symptoms, the majority of patients are diagnosed with advanced stages of disease. Moreover, even for those who undergo surgical resection, the risk of recurrence is extremely high (1–3). To improve the prognosis of patients with this disease, effective chemotherapy is essential. However, no chemotherapeutic drug has yet shown sufficient efficacy to be acknowledged as a standard therapy, although various agents have been evaluated in clinical trials (1–3).
Uracil–tegafur (UFT) is an orally administered drug that is a combination of uracil and tegafur in a 4:1 molar concentration ratio. Uracil prevents degradation of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) by inhibiting dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD), which leads to an increased level of 5-FU in plasma and tumor tissues (4–6). It appears that prolonged administration of UFT results in a similar or higher maximum concentration achieved (Cmax) as well as area under the curve (AUC) compared with those achieved with continuous infusion of 5-FU (7). In phase II trials in Japan, the antitumor activity of UFT was demonstrated in a variety of solid tumors including colorectal cancer and breast cancer (8,9). With regard to UFT for BTC, an overall response rate of 25% in eight evaluable patients was reported in a Japanese phase II trial in the early 1980s (8). However, the number of patients in that study was very small, and the results may have been unreliable because the quality of clinical trials in the early 1980s was debatable. Since then, the activity of UFT in BTC has not been re-evaluated, although UFT is approved and widely used for BTC in Japan and other countries. Therefore, we conducted a phase II trial to evaluate the antitumor activity and toxicity of UFT in patients with advanced BTC.
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PATIENTS AND METHODS |
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ELIGIBILITY
Patients eligible for study entry had histologically or cytologically confirmed advanced BTC. The eligibility criteria were: 20–74 years of age; an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 0–2; bidimensionally measurable disease; an estimated life expectancy
8 weeks after study entry; no prior chemotherapy; adequate hematological function (hemoglobin 11 g/dl, leukocytes 4000/mm3, neutrophils 2000/mm3 and platelets 100 000/mm3); adequate hepatic function (serum total bilirubin 
2.0 mg/dl and serum aspartate aminotransferase/alanine aminotransferase 2.5 times the upper limit of normal); adequate renal function (serum creatinine level within normal limits); and written informed consent. All patients with obstructive jaundice underwent percutaneous transhepatic or endoscopic retrograde biliary drainage before treatment. The exclusion criteria were: active infection; severe heart disease; refractory pleural effusion or ascites; active gastroduodenal ulcer; severe mental disorder; active concomitant malignancy; pregnant and lactating females; females of childbearing age unless using effective contraception; and other serious medical conditions.
Pre-treatment evaluation included taking a complete history and a physical examination. The pretreatment laboratory procedures were complete differential blood count, biochemistry tests and tumor markers including serum carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and serum carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9). All patients underwent electrocardiography, chest radiography and computed tomography (CT) scan within the 4 weeks before study entry.
TREATMENT SCHEDULE
UFT was administered orally at a dose of 360 mg/m2/day. The total daily dose of UFT was divided into three doses administered every 8 h. When doses could not be divided evenly, the highest dose was given in the morning and the lowest dose in the evening. The calculated UFT dose was rounded off to the nearest 100 mg.
When grade 3 hematological toxicity or grade 2 non-hematological toxicity was observed, treatment was delayed until the toxicity subsided to grade 1 or less. If the daily dose of UFT was considered to be intolerable, the dose was reduced by 100 mg/day (one capsule/day). UFT was administered until the appearance of disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. Patients who were refractory to this regimen were allowed to receive any other anticancer treatments at their physician's discretion.
RESPONSE AND TOXICITY EVALUATION
We used the Japan Society for Cancer Therapy criteria, which are fundamentally similar to the World Health Organization (WHO) criteria, for evaluating the tumor responses and the adverse effects. The objective tumor response was assessed by CT every 4 weeks after the beginning of UFT therapy. During this treatment, a complete differential blood count, serum chemistry profile and urinalysis were undertaken at least biweekly. Serum CEA and CA19-9 levels were measured every 4 weeks. Progression-free survival was defined as the time from the date of initial treatment to first documentation of progression or death. Overall survival was measured from the date of initial treatment to the date of death or the date of last follow-up.
STATISTICAL DESIGN
Analysis was to be performed when 19 patients were enrolled. In this study, the threshold response rate was defined as 5% and the expected response rate was set as 25%. If the lower limit of the 90% confidence interval (CI) exceeded the 5% threshold (objective response in four or more of the 19 patients), UFT was judged to be effective. If the upper limit of the 90% CI did not exceed the expected rate of 25% (zero or one objective response in the 19 patients), UFT was judged to be ineffective. If response was confirmed in two or three of the 19 patients, the decision whether or not to proceed to the next study was taken on the basis of the safety and survival data from the present study. In BTC, no chemotherapeutic drug has yet shown sufficient efficacy to be acknowledged as a standard therapy. Considering that this treatment also may be ineffective, the sample size in this study had to be set as a minimally required number of patients. Therefore, 90% was adopted as the CI, because the treatment could have been judged as ineffective due to the small sample size. This phase II trial was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the National Cancer Center.
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RESULTS |
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TOPAbstractINTRODUCTIONPATIENTS AND METHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONReferences |
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PATIENTS AND TREATMENTS
Nineteen patients were enrolled in this study at the two hospitals of the National Cancer Center between July 2002 and February 2004. The characteristics of the patients are listed in Table 1. A total of 33 courses were given, with an average of 1.7 courses (range 1–5) per patient. All patients discontinued this treatment because of disease progression. After abandoning UFT treatment, two patients received second-line chemotherapy with epirubicin, 5-FU and cisplatin (11); both patients showed stable disease with durations of 4.0 and 2.5 months, respectively. The remaining 17 patients received only best supportive care after the treatment.
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RESPONSE
All 19 patients were evaluable for response. No patient achieved a complete response. One patient with gallbladder carcinoma achieved a partial response with a duration of 2.0 months, giving an overall response rate of 5% (95% CI 0–26). Six patients (32%) showed no change and the remaining 12 (63%) had progressive disease. During treatment, the serum CEA level was reduced by >50% of the pre-treatment level in only one patient, who achieved a partial response, and there was no patient whose serum CA19-9 level decreased from the pre-treatment level.
TOXICITY
The toxicities observed in the 19 enrolled patients are listed in Table 2. The toxicity represents the maximum grade per patient for the entire course of therapy. Therapy with UFT was well tolerated, and all adverse events were manageable. Six patients (32%) showed grade 2 elevation of total bilirubin. However, the elevation in total bilirubin, which ranged from 1.1 to 2.0 times the upper limit of normal, was defined as grade 2 in the Japan Society for Cancer Therapy criteria, which is equivalent to grade 1 in the WHO criteria. No grade 3 or greater toxicities were observed in this study.
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SURVIVAL
All enrolled patients were included in the survival assessment. At the time of the analysis, 18 patients had died because of tumor progression. The median survival, 6-month survival rate, 1-year survival rate and median progression-free survival for all patients were 8.8 months, 52.6%, 21.1% and 1.0 months, respectively (Fig. 1). The median survivals in patients with intrahepatic bile duct carcinoma and in those with other tumors, including carcinoma of the gallbladder, extrahepatic bile duct and papilla of vater, were 9.5 and 5.7 months, respectively.
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DISCUSSION |
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TOPAbstractINTRODUCTIONPATIENTS AND METHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONReferences |
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The outcome of chemotherapy for BTC has not improved significantly in the last two decades, and the prognosis for patients with this disease still remains dismal. Because of the rarity of this cancer, there have been few well-designed chemotherapeutic trials conducted with a sufficient number of patients. The most commonly used single agent has been 5-FU, with response rates of
10% and median survival times of 6 months (1–3). Mitomycin C, which was considered by some investigators to be one of the active agents for the treatment of this disease, resulted in an objective response rate of 10% in an EORTC study (12). Recently, gemcitabine has shown promising antitumor activity for BTC in several studies, with reported response rates of 8–60% and median durations of survival ranging from 6.5 to 11.5 months, but it has not yet been accepted as a standard therapy for BTC (13). Moreover, combination chemotherapy has also proven equally disappointing because it rarely results in any meaningful clinical improvement. Thus, various agents have been evaluated in clinical trials, but no chemotherapeutic drug has yet shown sufficient efficacy to be acknowledged as a standard therapy (1–3). In Japan, only three anticancer agents, UFT, adriamycin and cytarabine, have been approved for BTC by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare of Japan. UFT (tegafur combined with uracil in a molar ratio of 1:4) represents a second-generation oral 5-FU prodrug that is converted to 5-FU in tissue (4–6). Compared with 5-FU, UFT has been reported to be less toxic and to have a higher therapeutic index in a variety of solid tumors (8–9). In patients with BTC, a Japanese phase II study in the early 1980s demonstrated that UFT at a daily dose of 300–600 mg shows a relatively high response rate (two out of eight, 25%) (8). However, since then, the activity of UFT in BTC has not been re-evaluated. A re-appraisal of UFT for advanced BTC is essential, because the number of patients in the previous study was very small and the evaluation of tumor response may have been unreliable because in the early 1980s imaging modalities had not been developed sufficiently. To elucidate the true efficacy of UFT, therefore, we conducted a phase II trial of UFT in patients with advanced BTC.
In the current study, only one of 19 patients obtained a partial response (response rate, 5%) with a duration of 2.0 months. Moreover, a rate of progressive disease of 63% and a median progression-free survival of only 1 month were particularly disappointing. The results of this study indicate that UFT has negligible activity in BTC and, even though it was well tolerated, cannot be recommended as routine treatment for advanced BTC. In this study, there was a large difference between overall survival (median: 8.8 months) and progression-free survival (median: 1.1 months). The difference was assumed to be due to the natural history of this disease, because only two patients received second-line chemotherapy and the remaining 17 patients received only best supportive care after the treatment. In studies by Mani et al. (14) and Chen et al. (15), combination therapy with UFT and leucovorin resulted in 0% response rates and median survivals of 7.0 and 5.2 months, respectively. These results are very similar to ours, and this regimen was also considered ineffective. However, the novel oral fluoropyrimidine derivatives S-1 (16) and capecitabine (17) have generated particular interest for the treatment of advanced BTC, since the response rates with these agents are reported to be higher than that with UFT. Further trials of these agents are currently being conducted in patients with advanced BTC.
In conclusion, UFT appears to show little activity as a single agent in treating patients with advanced BTC, although oral UFT therapy is convenient and well tolerated. These findings do not support the use of this regimen in clinical practice, and further trials in patients with BTC are not recommended. Therefore, we will continue to investigate other agents and regimens in an effort to increase response, survival and quality of life for patients with this disease.
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Acknowledgments |
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This study was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Cancer Research from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Japan. The authors thank Ms Yuriko Kawaguchi for manuscript preparation.
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References |
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