Roche’s Avastin Fails to Benefit Older Lung-Cancer Patients, Study Shows

Roche Holding AG (ROG)’s Avastin failed to significantly extend the lives of older lung-cancer patients in a government-funded study, raising questions about whether the treatment should be given to U.S. Medicare enrollees

. Patients aged 65 and older who received Avastin in addition to a standard chemotherapy regimen had a median overall survival of 9.7 months, according to the study to be published tomorrow in the Journal of the American Medical Association. While that was longer than the 8.9 months and 8 months for two groups of patients receiving chemotherapy only, the finding wasn’t statistically significant, said the researchers from the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

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