On September 19, 2016 the Life Raft Group was pleased to have Dr. Benjamin D. Humphreys, Chief of the Division of Nephrology at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, share his knowledge [...]
American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) is planning its first-ever clinical registry study, the Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry (TAPUR). ASCO plans should increase patient access to off-label drugs and match patients with [...]
Sutent 37.5 mg Ease of use and lower costs may be on the horizon for Sutent patients who are currently on a 37.5 milligram prescription. Available now, Pfizer has released a new [...]
Is pregnancy for me?, is a common question among GIST patients. At present there isn't a lot of data on pregnancy and GIST. The prescription information on Gleevec clearly warns of risks if a [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot about writing this article. The last thing I want to do is cause worry or pain to anyone reading this. Then I thought of all the people who could possibly benefit in the future from knowing ahead of time what we didn’t know at the time we needed to know it.
Sutent is the second-line approved treatment for Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumor and is prescribed when treatment with the first-line drug, Gleevec (Imatinib) is no longer effective or cannot be tolerated. The two drugs work differently, so [...]
Patients with GIST who received sunitinib using a flexible dose approach to manage adverse events remained on treatment longer than those who received the strict dose/schedule and exhibited better clinical outcomes (longer time to tumor progression and longer overall survival).
The Life Raft Group surveyed patients and physicians about dosing options for the drug Sutent (sunitinib) to follow up on a 2011 study that showed that patients on a continuous dose exhibited better clinical outcomes than those on the standard four-week on, two-week off dosing regimen.
Reviews of patients treated at three major cancer centers suggest that Sutent-related heart problems may be more common than initially reported. Reports of heart failure ranged from eight percent in 75 GIST patients treated [...]
