Date of Award

1-1-2019

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Public Health (MPH)

Department

School of Public Health

First Advisor

Hongyu Zhao

Second Advisor

Yung-Chi Cheng

Abstract

Abstract

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world, and chemotherapy plays an important role in cancer treatment. However, serious adverse effects of chemotherapy could jeopardize the efficacy of the treatment as well as patients’ quality of life. In order to remit this problem, a well-characterized herbal medicine, YIV-906 (KD018/PHY906), was developed as a combination therapy with chemotherapy. It is based on a traditional Chinese herbal formulation (Huang-Qin-Tang) that treats diseases related to gastrointestinal disorders and was investigated in a two-arm clinical trial for metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). A previous analysis done by Sun et al. showed significantly improved progression-free survival (PFS) in YIV-906 adjuvant group for mCRC patients who completed at least three cycles of treatment. This study confirmed these results using data from the same clinical trial and evaluated differences in health-related quality of life (HR-QoL) and metabolite profiles between experimental and control groups. The health-related quality of life was not significantly different between groups within four cycles, whereas from 5 to 8 cycles, patients in the YIV-906 group had significantly greater HR-QoL compared to those in the control group. To explore the mechanism of YIV-906’s impact on PFS or HR-QoL, expression levels of 72 metabolites were collected, and 4 out of these 72 metabolites were significantly impacted by YIV-906. In the future, analyses should confirm these results in larger clinical trials and should explore whether the metabolites identified here are related to improved PFS and HR-QoL in the YIV-906 group.

Comments

This is an Open Access Thesis.

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