Gilbert, Sorry the Tarceva was not for you but at least you gave it a shot.

Jill, My mom just died 2 weeks ago but thanks to the tarceva she died with no cancer in her lungs. She did not have any breathing trouble since starting the Tarceva and while it only held the liver mets stable for 7-8 months( then it was back to chemo). Tarceva gave her a great quality of life for over 1.5 yrs. She had her first pleural effusion in June 2004 which lead to finding the cancer which was stage IV NSCLC. I can not say enough good things about the drug and will be forever thankful of the time it gave her to spend with us. She tolerated it pretty well with just the rash which was like teenage acne for her and dried skin, dries cracked finger tips too but other then that nothing too bad. Evereyone responds differently to any drug so keep that in mind. We could tell within days it was working as at the time my mom had a bad pneumonia following her first line chemo and they put her on Irressa ( next month switched to the new released Tarceva) and antibiotics and with in a day she was feeling better and just kept getting better and better and soon was saying she was breathing better then she had in years and she was back to being her active old self so we figure it was working and her CT proved it.

I have met others that also started on Iressa and were later switched to Tarceva when Iressa was taken off the market and some of those people have been on it for 2-3 years and are currently N.E.D. ( No evidence of disease).When it works it can do great things so the bad thing is it only works in about 10% of the people.

Hope this helps if you heave any more questions feel free to ask as I feel like I am the Tarceva Rep! ( think they would pay me?) JanMarie

Can you tell me why Iressa was taken off the market? I have also heard that your body starts to figure out Tarceva over time which makes it less effective. Is there anything in the works to stop that from happening??

Thanks,
Jill

Quote from jlenzmeier:

Can you tell me why Iressa was taken off the market? I have also heard that your body starts to figure out Tarceva over time which makes it less effective. Is there anything in the works to stop that from happening??

Thanks,
Jill

There is another drug that is being tested through clinical trials that is being used for people who have had initial success with Tarceva then relapse. Off hand I don't remember the name of the drug, but supposedly the drug has been proven effective in the early trials. Kris

Jill, A drug called HKI 272 is currently in clinical trials ( phase II I think) It is suppose to take over once Tarvea quits working . We looked into the clinicial trials for my mom but she did not qualify for them. Too much chemo in her history.

When Iressa was taken off the market they said it was because it was not doing what they had expected. The reality of it is probably the fact that such a small number of people benefitted from it that the drug company did not stand to make millions or billions of dollars from it. Sad but it all does come down to money. I would like to see the head of the drug company telling those people it did benefit that were at the time 2-3 yrs NED that the drug did not do what they had hoped! I am convinced that the month my mom was on it it was working for her due to the huge improvement she had that month . We were just lucky that Tarceva also worked when they switched to it the next month.

They did rerun clinical trials that "proved" Iressa did not do what it first claimed to do.But if you were the big drug company trying to justify taking a drug that did help a small select group of people wouldn't you stack that clinical trial in your favor to get the results you wanted? That would have been easy as they could have selected people that were less likley to respond to it to have in the clinical trials.

As sad as it seems the bottom line is money and other drugs have been removed too because the profits were not high enough, despite the fact that people or sometimes animals did benefit from them. JanMarie