Well its been a fantastic weekend so far here in Liverpool.
Yesterday I was honoured to Chair the morning session of the Advocates meeting, followed by leading the Marketplace session on involving patients in improving standards of care.
Tomorrow I will become the first patient to address the congress when I report on the European Network of Gynae oncology Advocates Group (ENGAGe). There are several thousand people here so its a bit scary, but knowing that I have a job to do for you all gives me a great deal of confidence.
But the big news is that the overall survival data for ICON7 has just been presented.
As I'm sure you know, there is evidence that Avastin prolongs remission when given both in first line treatment and in relaps, however todays data looks at the overall survival. In the ICON7 study women in the high risk group, that is to say women with Stage 4 and women with stage 3 who had more than 1 cm of cancer left behind after their surgery who received Avastin had an overall survival improvement of 9.4 months compared to the same group of women who did not receive the drug. Obviously this is fantastic news for those who have had the drug and who can access it, and more leverage for us to campaign for its availability in the devolved nations. I am speaking with some clinicians throughout the day and will be investigating the impact that they feel this will have.
A good start to the day!
L x
Written by
LouiseOvacome
My Ovacome Team
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Perhaps those of us who have Avastin should keep it to one side for later! My new onc told me exactly the same thing. I'd be grateful for any leverage you can give to getting this drug made available in the devolved nations. Una, particularly will welcome this research and I'll send her a link to this blog.
We are grateful that Ovacome staff are so well respected, and as a consequence are asked to do things like this.
ENGAGe is an organization that Ovacome helped to create in response to our getting calls from across Europe and learning how poor the care is in some areas (For example some countries do not have a cervical screening program let alone a cervical vaccination program.) ENGAGe is working actively with the ESGO community to address these and other issues to promote improvements in care for all Gynae cancers across Europe.
Anne is a superstar and her work is incredibly valuable. I haven't seen her presentation as yet, but Thank you in advance for taking the time to support it.
Well done Louise hope you enjoyed our lovely city we are all. Very proud of it. The Gynae dr sand nurses especially the mac nurses are the best ever and we get great care from them. Keep us in touch with the outcome of the meeting. Thank you. Linda x
I was on the Icon 7 trial back in 2007. I received the Avastin every 3 weeks for a year and in fact returned to full time work after the standard 6 cycles of chemo had finished and then just carried on with the Avastin until the 12 months was up, just taking a day off every three weeks to have the Avastin administered. My first recurrence was in 2011, four and a half years after diagnosis. Living proof it does help !
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Surgery / no surgery
Following on from my post on Avastin length of treatment....
Good news from ~Anwen Jones today!!
Low grade serous carcinoma - what maintainence therapy
