Find Your Treatment Options (Coming Soon!)
An important part of our mission is to provide you unbiased, scientifically rigorous, comprehensive and up-to-date information regarding all treatment options for your particular cancer.
Based on your answers to a short questionnaire regarding your diagnosis and current treatments, we will provide you a roadmap of your treatment options, which will fall into three categories:
Standard of care: Your physician is the best source for this information. We provide this information here for the sake of completeness.
Clinical Trials: Your physician may recommend you enroll in a ‘clinical trial’. Clinical trials offer you promising treatments which are not yet proven to work for your situation. Many times these are new drugs not yet available to the general public and you have to enroll in a trial in order to receive the drug.
Scientifically promising treatment options: Many patients will not be able to enroll in a clinical trial due to distance or ineligibility for the trial. Such individuals still have options.
Joe's Story
Joe was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2005 and when standard treatments failed to stop the growth of his tumor, Joe asked his physician to recommend a clinical trial. His Boston based doctor recommended a phase I trial that was available at a prestigious hospital. Having done his homework, Joe knew that the main goal of a phase I trial is to find the ‘maximum tolerated dose’ of a new drug or a combination. He realized that the chances of benefiting from such a trial were small.
Joe was not quite ready to throw in the towel and wanted to find a therapy with higher probability of success. His searches on the Internet for glioblastoma treatments led him to a paper describing a phase II trial with a non-toxic anti-malarial drug (chloroquine) which appeared to double the survival time in glioblastoma cases. Unfortunately the trial had only enrolled 30 patients and since the ‘p value’ of the result was 0.14 (there was a 1 in 7 chance that the result was by chance!) and since the drug was generic and cheap, no drug company had spent its money to investigate it further. Nevertheless, Joe felt that the chance of this drug working was better than the phase I trial he was offered.
Joe learned some important lesions during his quest to obtain a promising therapy: