An acne-like rash may be good news for colon cancer patients because it shows that a targeted therapy for the disease is working, Belgian scientists said on Thursday. They found that the severity of the rash corresponded to the patient’s response to ImClone Systems Inc’s drug Erbitux and to the length of their survival. Professor Eric Van Cutsem, at Gasthuisberg University in Leuven, presented his group’s findings at the EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Geneva. The investigators tested the drug in combination with the cancer treatment irinotecan in 346 patients with advanced colon cancer that failed to respond to at least two previous chemotherapy regimes.
