
<b>Adriamycin, Doxil, and Epiadriamycin</b> are three members of the class of chemotherapy agents called anthracyclines.  

Adriamycin, and possibly to a lesser extent, Epiadriamycin,  is very toxic to bone marrow and heart, and causes permanent damage. There is a lifetime limit to the amount you can have. The side effects are severe. Adriamycin is a chemotherapy agent developed in the 1970's, and it is generally used for very resistant cancers. 
It is a first line, classic drug used for soft tissue sarcomas. During the pre-Gleevec years, GIST was included in the NON-uterine LMS statistics, which might account for a lowering of Adriamycin's response rate. GastroIntestinal Stromal Tumors are very difficult to treat. It is hard to know what Adriamycin's record with extremity or other LMS is, because of the confounding inclusion of GIST in the earlier studies.   

Doxil is a new preparation of doxorubicin, liposomal doxorubicin. In an appropriate dose, it is supposedly equivalent to Adriamycin in effectiveness, but delivers much less toxicity to the normal tissues of the rest of the body. The side effect profile is likewise much less severe.  It is still too new a drug to know about the cardiotoxicity, or the potency.  

[Editorial comment. Understand that Doxil has not been in use for very long, and that there might be side effects or undesirable long term effects that have not yet been discovered.  Doxil is currently more expensive than the other agents mentioned. Doxil must be taken in an adequate dosage for it to be equivalent to Adriamycin.  Doxil is the safer and better tolerated drug so far as we know to date, but we do not know if it is clinically as powerful as doxorubicin in treating LMS.]

EpiAdriamycin is an agent very similar to Adriamycin, used in similar circumstances.  It is believed to have less cardiac toxicity than Adriamycin, but likewise has a lifetime limit because of cardiac toxicity.  

The Clinical Trial Results further below are the abstracts of Clinical Trials of doxorubicin [Adriamycin] and its related compounds either alone or with other chemotherapy agents, when the trials included leiomyosarcomas among the patients' tumors. 

