A prospective multicenter trial of S-1 with lafutidine vs S-1 as adjuvant chemotherapy for gastric cancer in Japan: AEOLUS.

Abstract

91 Background: From the result of ACTS-GC study, adjuvant chemotherapy with S-1 for one year is standard therapy of gastric cancer in Japan. In this study, completion rate of pre-planned S-1 treatment was 65.8% and there is still room for improvement on this rate. Lafutidine is a H2 blocker and enhances submucosal blood flow via capsaicin-sensitive afferent neurons. Alleviating effect of lafutidine on toxicity of 5FU leading to discontinuation of adjuvant treatment could be expected. Methods: Patients with histologically confirmed stage II (excluding T1 cases), IIIA, or IIIB (Japanese Classification of Gastric Carcinoma 13th) who underwent gastrectomy with D2 lymphadenectomy were randomly assigned to receive S-1 with lafutidine(L) or S-1 (S). All patients were given S-1 (40mg/m2) for 4 weeks with 2 weeks rest, repeated for 1 year after surgery. Patients of L group received lafutidine (20mg/day) every day for 1 year with S-1. The primary end point was treatment completion rate (TCR) of S-1. Definition of treatment completion was S-1 continuation for 1 year with over 70% planned dose. The secondary end points were toxicity (CTCAE v3.0) and relative total administration dose (RD) of S-1. Results: We randomly assigned 101 patients to the L group and 101 patients to the S group between February 2010 and December 2012 from 17 centers in Japan. After randomization, two patients were found to be ineligible in L group (the absence of cytologic examination of the peritoneal fluid, stageIB) and 1 in S group (allocation violation). TCR was 68.3% in the L group and 60.4% in the S group (p = 0.072, Cochran-Mantel-Haenzel test at a pre-specified one-sided significance level of 0.1). Adverse events of grade 3/4 excluding ineligible example was 30.0% in the L group, and 36.0% in the S group. Patients who require a dose reduction and/or delay of S-1 was 41.6% in the L group, and 51.5% in the S group. RD was 83.9% (range: 1.6-103.7) in the L group, and 84.0% (range: 1.7-103.8) in the S group. No any toxicity of lafutidine was observed. Conclusions: Lafutidine may increase a completion rate of adjuvant chemotherapy using S-1 within a 30% dose reduction for gastric cancer. This result need to be confirmed in double-blind placebo control study. Clinical trial information: UMIN000002703.