Clinical Outcome of Systemic Treatment for Advanced Soft Tissue Sarcoma: Real-Life Perspective in Japan

Abstract

Introduction

The median survival time of patients with advanced soft tissue sarcoma (STS) is typically <12 months. Since 2012, physicians were able to administer second- and/or third-line treatment easily in Japan, following the approval of new drugs, namely, pazopanib, eribulin, and trabectedin. We investigated the real-life experience of adults with advanced STS who received systemic therapy after the approval of the aforementioned new drugs.

Patients and Methods

We retrospectively evaluated 34 patients (median age: 66 years) with primary STS arising at the extremities/trunk or unresectable local and/or metastatic STS between 2012 and 2019. We evaluated the tumor response and patient survival after initial systemic treatment.

Results

As first-line treatment, doxorubicin and ifosfamide and other drugs were administered to 7 and 27 patients, respectively. Of 31 patients with an evaluable tumor response, partial response was observed in 2 (6.5%) patients, and 16 (52%) patients showed stable disease at 8 weeks. The 1- and 2-year survival rates were 51.4% and 28.4%, respectively. The median overall survival (OS) time was 12.6 months. Tumor response to first-line therapy was related to patient prognosis.

Conclusion

New drugs may be beneficial for patients with advanced STS. When patients cannot receive anthracycline-based chemotherapy because of a high risk of side effects, we believe that the aforementioned drugs may be administered as the first-line treatment.

Keywords:

• soft tissue sarcoma
• eribulin
• pazopanib
• trabectedin
• efficacy
• overall survival

Ethics Approval

This study was approved by the institutional review board of Mie University Hospital.

Disclosure

We declare that we have no conflict of interest to declare in relation to this study.