Irinotecan Combination Chemotherapy for Refractory or Relapsed Brain Tumor in Children and Adolescents

The outcome of pediatric refractory or relapsed brain tumor is very dismal. Standard chemotherapy showed poor response to these patients. Although tandem high dose chemotherapy with hematopoietic progenitor stem cell rescues has been chosen as a potentially curative therapy for long term survival and better outcome is expected if tumor burden before transplantation reduced by chemotherapy, effective salvage chemotherapy for tumor reduction is not established yet. Irinotecan is a recently developed topoisomerase I inhibitor, and there are preclinical and phase I, II data which proved practical effects in brain tumors. In those studies, irinotecan was administered alone or in combination with one other drug. Vincristine, etoposide, carboplatin, and cyclophosphamide have been used in many protocols for brain tumors but the result was very poor in refractory or relapsed cases. However, irinotecan can be effective with these multiple chemotherapeutic agents. According to the pilot study of irinotecan in combination with vincristine, etoposide, carboplatin and cyclophosphamide in the investigators center, 75% percent of total 12 patients reached more than stable disease, and 2 patients got long term complete remission only with this multi-agent combination chemotherapy. But the combination of irinotecan, vincristine, etoposide, carboplatin, and cyclophosphamide is not clinically studied yet especially for pediatric patients. To improve response rate and progression-free survival, the combination chemotherapy of irinotecan, vincristine, etoposide, carboplatin, and cyclophosphamide is designed for pediatric refractory or relapsed brain tumor.