Safety, Efficacy of Balugrastim to Treat Chemotherapy-Induced Neutropenia

Balugrastim, a new long-lasting recombinant granulocyte colony-stimulating factor, is an alternative to pegfilgrastim in regard to reducing the mean duration of severe neutropenia. Researchers assessed balugrastim’s efficacy, safety, and tolerability in 4 different clinical trials involving breast cancer patients treated with doxorubicin and doxetaxel, and published their findings in Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management.

Neutropenia and febrile neutropenia are 2 frequent complications of chemotherapy treatment and recombinant granulocyte colony-stimulating factors are used to preserve absolute neutrophils count throughout the duration of chemotherapy treatment.

Thus far there has been limited literature available on balugrastim. The researchers assessed the available studies and found that balugrastim did not cause any severe adverse events or compromise quality of life. The administration of balugrastim was found to be extremely safe, and it had a slight advantage over pegfilgrastim in shortening the mean time to absolute neutrophils count recovery.

However, since all the studies analyzed were performed in homogenous populations of breast cancer patients treated with docetaxel and doxorubicin, the authors recommend additional research involving different tumor types and chemotherapy combinations, as well as long-term studies to adequately evaluate the safety of balugrastim.