Patients with metastatic stomach or esophageal cancers driven by a mutated HER2 gene had markedly improved response rates and survival when Avastin (bevacizumab) was added to a combination of capecitabine and oxaliplatin chemotherapy and Herceptin (trastuzumab).
How’s this for a paradox: The better cancer centers become at keeping patients alive, the more expensive cancer care becomes. This brutal tradeoff hits harder in rural areas, where the cancer burden is higher and the investigator and clinical trial representation is lower.
