Are there chemotherapy and other drug therapy options available for recurrence and/or metastasis?
Currently, there are no drug therapies that have been proven to be effective in a large portion of ACC patients. Accordingly, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved any drugs specifically for ACC patients. However, that does not mean that there have not been good responses to particular drugs in particular ACC patients. Medical oncologists are able to prescribe drugs for ACC patients even if the FDA has not explicitly approved the drug for use in ACC patients (“off-label” prescriptions). Increasingly, medical oncologists are attempting to customize therapies to the genomic or proteomic profile of each patient’s individual tumor (i.e. “personalized medicine”) in the hope that the treatments will become more effective and have fewer side effects. Rather than recommend merely one drug to all advanced ACC patients, a medical oncologist might add another drug based on the presence (or absence) of a particular protein in a patient’s tumor. For example, an ACC patient with a
