Clinical Trials (4/24/2007)
I have recently been diagnosed with a form of cancer that, although treatable with current protocols, does not have a standard form of treatment. I have been advised to research whether a chemotherapy clinical trial has been established for my disease. I do not know how to begin to research whether a clinical trial is available to me. Any advice?
Finding information about clinical trials is extremely difficult. However, a patient information group in Massachusetts is attempting to aggregate on one web site all the available clinical trials. Go to www.searchclinicaltrials.org. The site is fee of charge. Drug companies are also posting the results of clinical trials on their web sites so it would also be worth searching all of those sites as well.
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Cell Culture Assay Testing
Each and every cancer patient could have his/her own unique chemotherapy trial based on consultation of pathogenic profiles and drug sensitivity testing data. Having some foreknowledge of a given agent's expected result before its administration would benefit the individual patient.
What can be done is to sort out what's the best profile in terms of which patients benefit from this drug or any other drug. Can they be combined? What's the proper way to work with these new drugs?
If a drug works extremely well for a certain percentage of cancer patients, identify which ones. If one drug or another is working for some people (not average populations) then obviously there are others out there who would also benefit.
What's good for the group (population) may not be good for the individual, affirms that in the tactic of using "fresh" biopsied cells to predict which cancer treatments will work best for the individual patient. Each of the new "targeted" drugs are not for everybody. Even when the disease is the same type, different patients' tumors respond differently to the same agent.
Upgrading clinical therapy by using drug sensitivity assays measuring "cell death" of three dimensional microclusters of live "fresh" tumor cells, can improve the situation by allowing more drugs to be considered. The more drug types there are in the selective arsenal, the more likely the system is to prove beneficial.
Drug sensitivity tests support the idea that a marginal benefit in terms of overall survival is observed in cancer patients with normal prognoses, but there are marked survival benefits for cancer patients with poor prognoses.
gpawelski 8/2/2007 9:47:53 AM
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