#lartruvo

[moneyhealthfinance-blog]

Lilly's cancer therapy Lartruvo fails study, shares drop Eli Lilly said on Friday its cancer treatment Lartruvo, approved on an accelerated basis in 2016, failed to improve patient survival in a long-term study and will no longer be prescribed, driving shares down 3 percent before the bell. The company said it expects to take a charge in the first qua... Business News

[kathi-b-writes]

How Can It Be Working?

I feel good. (I knew that I would now ... sorry.) I had a chemo treatment last Tuesday, my 3rd with Lartruvo, and I've had hardly any side effects. No nausea, no weird smells and tastes, no neuropathy ... just a little constipation, a few mouth sores and some fatigue but not to the degree I've had in the past. So that's all good, right?

I don't know.

The Good Doctor swears to me that there's no correlation between the severity of the side effects and whether or not the drug is working -- I even asked him again on Tuesday when he declared that I'm doing great, my lungs are clear, my blood numbers are excellent, etc. So why do I have such a hard time believing him?

It just doesn't seem logical to me that this intravenously delivered poison can be shrinking the tumors without making me at least a little bit miserable. Instead, I'm feeling better than I've felt with any previous chemo drugs. I'm going to work every day, managing quick trips to the supermarket and eating pretty much whatever I want. Of course, I still nod off at my desk during the workday, but I attribute that to boredom as much as anything else.

So, gift horse and all. But I'm still wary. We'll find out the results on May 1st or thereabouts.

[kathi-b-writes]

Goodbye, Halaven; Hello, Lartruvo

After the complete waste of time that was Halaven, next week I'll be starting on Lartruvo, which was just FDA-approved for soft tissue sarcoma this past October. Because of that, there's not a lot of information about it other than what was released from the clinical trials. But they indicated that it was quite effective. Of course, they said the same thing about Halaven, and a 7-millimeter growth would contradict that.

But onward we go. Naturally, one of the things I've wondered about Lartruvo is how it was named. The generic name is olaratumab, so I'm guessing that the “lar” in “Lartruvo” must have something to do with the “lar” in the generic. Or I could be completely wrong. At this point I don't care what they call any of them -- I'd just like one of them to work.

I'll be getting this drug along with a small amount of Adriamycin, which has been the only drug I've received so far that reduced the nodules (but then I became resistant to it). I'll get the combination for a while and then get the Lartruvo alone, and the clinical trials show that it keeps working even after the Adriamycin is stopped.

We'll find out if it's working some time in mid-May -- just in time for my birthday.  Some shrinkage would be a really nice present.