Comparison Study of Sorafenib and 5-fluorouracil/Mitomycin for Metastatic Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Most HCC patients are diagnosed at advanced stages in Korea, but effective treatment strategies for advanced HCC have not been established. In particular, optimal treatment strategy for extrahepatic as well as intrahepatic recurrences following locoregional therapy (e.g., transarterial chemoembolization, radiofrequency ablation therapy, and percutaneous ethanol injection) is still a challenging issue. Extrahepatic metastasis has been encountered more frequently, being more problematic than before in the management of HCC due to the increased survival with effective locoregional treatments. The lung is the most common site of extrahepatic metastasis and the surgical resection of pulmonary metastatic lesions may result in improved survival in selected patients. Previous studies suggested that aggressive management including resection of the extrahepatic recurrence combined with locoregional therapy for intrahepatic HCC may offer long-term survival in selected patients with recurrent HCC following hepatectomy. Such an aggressive strategy has serious limitation in clinical practice in that extrahepatic recurrence usually present as multiple lesions. Systemic chemotherapy has been one of the most commonly used treatment modalities for patients with multiple extrahepatic metastasis. However, chemotherapy using either a single or combined cytotoxic agents provides only limited benefit for such patients. The aim of this study is to compare the efficacy of sorafenib to 5-fluorouracil/mitomycin in HCC patients with pulmonary metastasis whose intrahepatic tumors had been previously controlled with repeated locoregional therapies before the initiation of systemic chemotherapy.

Outline:

• Experimental arm(the FM group): Patients receive 5-FU IV continuously over 10 hours on day 1~6 and mitomycin IV push on day 1~4. Treatment repeats every 28 days.
• Active Comparator arm(the sorafenib group): Patients will receive 2 tablets of sorafenib (200 mg/tablet) twice daily, orally on a continuous basis.

In all arms, treatment continues in the absence of disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. During the treatment period, patients will have study visits on Day 1 of every cycle (every 4 weeks from start of study drug) and will receive CT/MRI assessment every 2 cycles (every 8 weeks). In the event of radiological progression confined to the liver, e.g. appearance of new nodules in the liver in areas previously not treated by locoregional therapies, patients will then also be treated with locoregional therapies such as TACE or local ablation as long as the they may still benefit from treatment. If patients are no longer amenable to locoregional therapies (in the case of untreatable progression), the study will be stopped and best supportive care be offered. This will be based on the investigator's clinical judgment of the subject's status.