Benjamin Carcamo & Giulio Francia from the Department of Pediatric Hematology Oncology, El Paso Children’s Hospital, the Department of Pediatrics, Texas Tech University Health Science Center and Border Biomedical Research Center, University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), El Paso, USA have published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine an artivle reporting a samll sereis of pedaitric patients treated withmetronomic chemotherapy. The article is entitled: Cyclic Metronomic Chemotherapy for Pediatric Tumors: Six Case Reports and a Review of the Literature

The full text is available here.

The six cases comprised one rhabdoid tumor of the kidney, one ependymoma, two medulloblastomas, one neuroblastoma, and a type II neurocytoma of the spine.

Treatment included :
 oral cyclophosphamide daily for 21 days alternating with oral etoposide daily for 21 days - - daily valproic acid
 daily celecoxib. In one case, celecoxib was substituted with sulindac.

Of the six patients, three showed complete responses, and all patients showed some response to metronomic therapy with only minor hematologic toxicity. One patient had hemorrhagic gastritis likely associated with NSAIDs while off prophylactic antacids.

These data add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that continuous doses of valproic acid and celecoxib coupled with alternating metronomic chemotherapy of agents such as etoposide and cyclophosphamide can produce responses in pediatric tumors relapsing to conventional dose chemotherapy.