Dr. Primrose on Adjuvant Capecitabine For Biliary Tract Cancer

John Primrose, MD, ChB, FRCS, professor of medicine/surgery, University of Southampton, United Kingdom, discusses the impact of capecitabine (Xeloda) for the treatment of patients with biliary tract cancer.

The chemotherapy agent first showed promise in the BILCAP trial, which was presented at the 2017 ASCO Annual Meeting and which Primrose is the lead author. Findings showed a significant improvement in overall survival (OS) for patients treated with capecitabine compared with the control arm. The improvement, Primrose says, was about 15 months. If one splits up the disease into subgroups, it leads to patient populations that are too small to analyze individually. Primrose concludes from these findings that capecitabine should be the standard of care for patients who are fit to receive adjuvant chemotherapy following resection. It also should be the control arm for further adjuvant clinical trials.

Primrose adds that capecitabine is fairly tolerable. It is difficult to argue against its use, he says.