“There are some trends for a difference in the expression of DNA repair between the right and the left. It seems on the right, it’s on the higher side than on the left,” Dr. Lenz commented, while cautioning that numbers of patients with right-sided tumors were fairly small.
The mFOLFOX and FOLFIRI arms had essentially the same rates of treatment-emergent adverse events of grade 3 or worse (80% and 81%). But the former had a higher rate of events leading to withdrawal from any study treatment (47% vs. 23%) and to outright study discontinuation (15% vs. 9%). “The majority of these events are related to neurotoxicity,” he reported.
Adverse events of interest because of bevacizumab’s mechanism of action, such as hypertension and bleeding, were similar across treatment arms and as expected, with no substantial impact from combining the agent with chemotherapy, according to Dr. Lenz.