Clinical Trials to Identify Aver

Clinical Trials to Identify Average-Patient Drug Treatments

In clinical trials, patients who all have the same type of cancer are treated with an anti-cancer drug. If a certain percentage of patients participating in a clinical trial benefit from the drug it is then adopted for any patient who has that type of cancer. The percentage of patients who must benefit before a drug is adopted could be as low as 20% or perhaps as high as 70% or 80%, depending upon the type and stage of cancer involved. In any case, the goal in clinical trials is to identify the best treatment to give to the average cancer patient.

The problem with that approach is that no cancer patient is average. Instead, each cancer patient is unique. And so it doesn't help that a certain drug works for 70% of patients if you are among the 30% for whom the drug doesn’t work. The situation becomes even worse when drugs that help only 20% of patients are administered routinely to 100% of patients, as is now usually the case in some disease settings.

Today, many approved treatments are available for most types of cancer. A cancer physician always takes into account what type of cancer a patient has, how far it has advanced, and what, if any, other types of therapy, such as surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy, the patient has received previously. The physician also takes into account known drug toxicities, the patient’s age, weight, physical condition and other clinical factors which might affect the patient’s prognosis and ability to receive certain types of drugs. However, none of these factors accurately predict how a patient will respond to treatment with specific chemotherapy drugs.

The goal of Functional Tumor Cell Profiling is to examine hidden factors which are unique to each patient - those occurring at the cellular level - and then to determine which therapy affords the best chance for benefit.