Conditions: Head and Neck Cancer
Keywords: Pralatrexate Vitamin B12 Folic Acid 10-112
Allocation: NA | Intervention model: SINGLE_GROUP
Enrollment: 13
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
The purpose of this study is to find out if the experimental drug pralatrexate with the vitamins folic acid and vitamin B12 might be an effective treatment for head and neck cancer. The reason we are doing this study is because another drug called methotrexate has been used for a long time to treat head and neck cancer patients. Pralatrexate was designed by scientists to be a new drug that works better than methotrexate. Laboratory studies have shown that pralatrexate works better than methotrexate at killing cancer cells.

Pralatrexate has already been studied in patients with other types of cancers, such as lymphoma and lung cancer. The results from those studies were promising. Pralatrexate was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a new treatment for a cancer called peripheral T cell lymphoma.

Detailed description:

Arms:
arm 1: This will be an open-label, single arm, Simon optimal two-stage design phase II study.

Interventions: intervention 1: Pralatrexate With Vitamin B12 and Folic Acid
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: Patients will be treated with 30 mg/m2 of pralatrexate intravenously once weekly for 3 weeks in a 4 week cycle with vitamin supplementation. Patients will take 1.0-1.25 mg oral folic acid on a daily basis. Folic acid should be initiated during the 10-day period preceding the first dose of pralatrexate and dosing will be continued during the full course of therapy and for 30 days after the last dose of pralatrexate. Patients will also receive a vitamin B12 (1 mg) intramuscular injection no more than 10 weeks prior to the first dose of pralatrexate and every 8-10 weeks thereafter. Subsequent vitamin B12 injections may be given the same day as treatment with pralatrexate.

Protocol document: