A Prospective, Phase II Trial of Induction Chemotherapy with Docetaxel/Cisplatin for Masaoka Stage III/IV Thymic Epithelial Tumors

A Prospective Phase II Study of Cisplatin and Cremophor EL-Free Paclitaxel (Genexol-PM) in Patients with Unresectable Thymic Epithelial Tumors

“…8 Given the high response rate of this study and previous study from our institute, combination of cisplatin and taxane regimens are highly effective. 11 In terms of safety, major adverse events in this study were myelosuppression, neuropathy, and hypersensitivity reaction. Bone marrow suppression with grade 3/4 neutropenia was observed in 11 patients (26%), including seven (17%) with febrile neutropenia.…”

“…Given the limitation of small number of patients for each arm, a possible explanation for these findings is that a higher proportion of patients with thymoma compared with thymic carcinoma was exposed to previous chemotherapy (31% versus 15%). In contrast, Park et al 11 reported a numerically higher response rate in thymic carcinoma than thymoma (67% versus 56%) using a cisplatin and docetaxel combination as neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Thus, additional studies are needed to determine whether paclitaxel or taxane has better efficacy in thymic carcinoma than in thymoma.…”

Are Anthracycline-Based Regimens Truly Indicated To Be the Standard Chemotherapy Regimen for Thymic Carcinoma?

“…These studies, which included patients with TC, compared treatments not including anthracycline with regimens containing anthracycline (Table 4). 7,8,14,15,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38] The literature includes five prospective trials (one that was limited to patients with TC 39 and four that included patients with TC and patients with thymoma 7,8,15,33 ) and four retrospective trials that were limited to patients with TC. [34][35][36][37] Four reports investigated the use of cisplatin-based regimens without anthracycline.…”

“…The cisplatin plus docetaxel (CD) regimen demonstrated a high RR (63%) in the treatment of TEMs, and the RR in patients with TC was 67%; however, the study population was not limited to patients with TC. 33 The cisplatin plus irinotecan (CI) regimen showed efficacy equivalent to that of CD 37 ; however, the trial was retrospective and included only in patients with TC. The evidence suggested that the efficacy of CD is superior to that of CI.…”

“…Our search of the literature yielded nine evaluable prospective trials that evaluate the efficacy of chemotherapy alone in the treatment of patients with thymic malignancies (Table 5). 7,8,10,15,21,24,32,33 When the studies are limited to those with populations consisting solely of patients with TC, only four prospective trials remain, and all of them are only phase II trials. 15,21,33,39 Although only one prospective trial was limited to patients with TC, the other three trials included 10 or more patients with advanced TC.…”