Many effective anti-cancer drugs are in use and several exciting new drugs soon will become available.  But not every treatment will help every cancer patient.  The rapid expansion of therapy options poses difficult challenges for physicians, drug companies, insurance carriers, and the FDA, who must determine when, how, and to whom cancer therapies are to be administered.  For the individual cancer patient, the question is more immediate - “Which cancer therapy is best for me?”  Functional Tumor Cell Profiling provides the answer by matching each patient with the treatment that offers the best chance for success.

Functional Tumor Cell Profiling is a laboratory test – several tests, actually - that measure the abilities of different drugs to kill living tumor cells obtained from individual cancer patients.  These newer cell death-based tests differ in many important respects from older generation tests which measured DNA synthesis or cell colony growth.  In over 50 separate, published clinical studies, functional tumor cell profiling using the newer cell death-based assays accurately and reproducibly measured drug-induced cell death and correlated with patient response to treatment with many different chemotherapy drugs.  Drugs that killed a patient’s tumor cells in the laboratory were 7 -9 times more likely to improve clinical response rates and prolong patient survival than drugs that were not effective at killing the patient’s tumor cells in the laboratory.  Patients can and do benefit when therapy selection is guided by Functional Tumor Cell Profiling.              

This website is sponsored and administered by the Weisenthal Cancer Group, which provides a laboratory testing method called Functional Tumor Cell Profiling.  Weisenthal Cancer Group accepts no financial support from any drug company, medical equipment manufacturer, insurance carrier, professional organization, or hospital group.