Time for 5-FU to Go!

The evolution of adjuvant therapy for breast cancer is necessarily slow due to the large size of clinical trials that typically find only incremental improvements with one treatment versus another, usually after years of follow-up. For the last 30 years, improvement in adjuvant chemotherapy has been marked largely by the substitution of one drug for another (e.g., an anthracycline for methotrexate) in an established regimen or by the use of an additional drug (e.g., a taxane) following an established regimen. Although many modest permutations have emerged in recent years, this strategy has been the model for adjuvant therapy research. During this time, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) has remained a component of some chemotherapy regimens, such as FEC…