Hi
I'm on this board on behalf of my brother who has stage 4 lung cancer, and is currently unconscious and on a ventilator due to bleeding in the lung, due to large tumor (3 weeks now) at City of Hope outside of LA. He has the ALK gene mutation, and was on Xalcori for one week, before his platelets dropped and he had to get alot of blood products and the bleeding had gotten worst. He was taken off Xalcori, has started radiation, and today they did a procedure in which they cutoff the blood supply to the tumor and other things to stop the bleeding.
My question is what can be done, if there is bleeding, and the platelet drop side effect, with Xalcori. Has anyone had any experience of whether people can still take it, and if so how? For the one week that he was on Xalcori/crizotinib, he did have a response based on his CT scan, so it would be great if he could go back on. But the danger of bleeding, or possibly bleeding again remains, and he seems to have the platelet drop side effect as a result of Xalcori.
Thanks in advance.
Reply # - July 25, 2012, 07:13 PM
Reply To: Question about taking Xalcori when bleeding with
Marjan, I'm so very sorry that your brother is in such a delicate situation.
I don't have any information that will help answer your question but will send a request to have a doctor comment. You should get a response within the day.
I hope your brother gets a chance to try Xalcori again.
Janine
forum moderator
Reply # - July 25, 2012, 07:43 PM
Reply To: Question about taking Xalcori when bleeding with
I know that patients can have blood count drops with XALKORI, but I haven't heard of anyone having a drop in platelets that was so sudden or so severe that it required coming off of the drug. The drug was approved after just a few years of clinical testing, after the results from a few hundred patients with an ALK rearrangement demonstrated very significant activity and generally good tolerability. It's possible that he's the first or one of the first people to have such a reaction to XALKORI.
In general, when a treatment is effective but associated with very significant toxicity, we try to see if it's possible to give a low enough dose that a person might still respond but experience quite a bit less of the side effect. That said, the folks at City of Hope are very good, so I suspect that there are already very thoughtful people working on his care.
Good luck.
-Dr. West
Reply # - April 22, 2015, 10:10 PM
Hi
Hi
I’m on this board on behalf of my brother who has stage 4 lung cancer, and is currently unconscious and on a ventilator due to bleeding in the lung, due to large tumor (3 weeks now) at City of Hope outside of LA. He has the ALK gene mutation, and was on Xalcori for one week, before his platelets dropped and he had to get alot of blood products and the bleeding had gotten worst. He was taken off Xalcori, has started radiation, and today they did a procedure in which they cutoff the blood supply to the tumor and other things to stop the bleeding.