Schering drug prevents fungus in patients -study

Last Updated: 2007-01-25 11:52:50 -0400 (Reuters Health)

BOSTON (Reuters) - The Schering-Plough fungus-fighter Noxafil is at least as good -- and in some ways better -- than older drugs designed to protect patients with crippled immune systems, according to two studies financed by the company.

In one test involving 602 cancer patients whose ability to fight infection was reduced because of their chemotherapy treatments, the risk of fungal infection was just 2 percent in the group taking Noxafil, known generically as posaconazole.

That compares to 8 percent among the volunteers receiving either of two drugs available in generic form, fluconazole or itraconazole.

"Posaconazole prevented invasive fungal infections more effectively than did either fluconazole or itraconazole, and improved overall survival," the team led by Oliver Cornely of the University of Cologne in Germany wrote in their report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In the other test, Andrew Ullmann of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and his colleagues found that Noxafil was just as effective at preventing all fungal infections as fluconazole.

However among the 600 volunteers, whose immune systems were suppressed because they were being treated for graft-versus-host-disease after a bone marrow stem cell transplant, the risk of death from a fungal infection was just 1 percent among those getting Noxafil compared to 4 percent in the fluconazole group.

But the researchers warned that the newer drug seemed to produce more side-effects.

In a commentary in the Journal, Ben De Pauw and Peter Donnelly of the University Medical Center St. Radboud in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, said Noxafil "appears to be the drug of choice" for preventing one type of fungal infection, known as aspergillosis.

But they said other drugs may be better for actually treating that infection when it appears.