Call it “targeted therapy” or “precision medicine,” but we just call it the cutting edge of cancer research! Part of our hope for the future is finding customized treatments that work very specifically on different cancers and different people. In Alabama, we are lucky to have institutions such as the University of Alabama at Birmingham playing a critical role in this kind of research.
Most recently came the news that UAB’s Comprehensive Cancer Center is enrolling patients for the National Cancer Institute Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice, or NCI-MATCH study, the largest, most scientifically rigorous precision medicine trial in cancer to date.
http://www.uab.edu/news/focus-on-patient-care/item/7469
According to the article, the clinical trial is open to patients whose cancer has returned, has gotten worse after standard treatment, or has no standard treatment at all.
This is the way possible new treatments are usually explored and developed, and those of us who have personally experienced cancer are always indebted to those who went before us and participated in these trials that ultimate saved our lives.
The hope is that researchers will now find even more weapons in their arsenal against this disease, and that the new therapies will attack each cancer where it is vulnerable and in ways that don’t inflict so much collateral damage.
“We are at an exciting point in cancer where we can tailor care to the individual patient based on emerging treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person,” Carla Falkson, M.D., professor in the UAB Division of Hematology and Oncology and principal investigator for the trial, is quoted as saying.
The hope is eventually to enroll 3,000 adult patients at UAB in the research study. If you think you might be a candidate, talk with your oncologist. Or to find out more details about eligibility, etc., contact Liz Busby, director of Oncology Clinical Trials at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center, at 205-934-0337 or [email protected].