A Trial Comparing Two Medications as First Treatment in Elderly Patients With Metastatic or Advanced Soft Tissue Sarcoma

Patients with a locally advanced or metastatic (i.e., there are already metastases of the diagnosed tumor in the body outside the primary lesion) soft tissue sarcoma will be recruited for this study. The minimum age to enter the study is 60 years. Therapy with doxorubicin is the mainstay of palliative chemotherapy for these patients, which is associated with hematological toxicity and an increase of the infection rate. Pazopanib is known to rarely induce hematological toxicity or to trigger infection. We therefore assume that pazopanib exerts similar activity while decreasing neutropenia and neutropenic fever. Pazopanib is already approved in the U.S. and Europe for the treatment of advanced soft tissue sarcoma. Doxorubicin and pazopanib will be randomly allocated to either receive doxorubicin or pazopanib in a phase II clinical trial. The aim of this study is to measure the treatment effect (reduction in tumor size or tumor stabilization) for both drugs, as well as the survival rate, and the duration of tumor control by the different therapies. A further objective is to measure the quality of life by standardized questionnaires throughout the course of treatment.