Dr. Mirza on Impact of Niraparib in Ovarian Cancer

Mansoor Raza Mirza, MD, chief oncologist at Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark, discusses niraparib in patients with platinum-sensitive recurrent ovarian cancer

In the phase III NOVA trial, presented at the 2016 ESMO Congress and simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the PARP1/2 inhibitor significantly improved progression-free survival (PFS) in patients.

After a median follow-up of 16.9 months, the median PFS with maintenance niraparib was 21 months compared with 5.5 months for placebo in patients with germline BRCA mutations (HR, 0.27; 95% CI, 0.17-0.41; P <.001).

This is going to change the way of thinking about ovarian cancer, says Mirza. When patients with ovarian cancer relapsed before they had to receive chemotherapy again and again, and would most likely eventually die of the disease. Niraparib has the potential to turn platinum-sensitive recurrent ovarian cancerinto a chronic disease, so patients can live with minimal toxicity after treatment, and have a normal life for a very long time.

It’s not a small subgroup of patients that are responding, even patients with high-grade endometrial cancer are seeing benefit, says Mirza. These are landmark results that will change practice.