If you have been diagnosed with cancer, then you may want to consider taking part in a cancer clinical trial. These cancer clinical trials have proven to be a very viable option for a large number of cancer patients.
Currently, there are numerous cancer clinical trials which are looking to enroll patients with just about every form of cancer. This may be an option which is perfect for you, but do you even know anything about these clinical trials for cancer?
A clinical trial is conducted with a group of volunteers in order to conduct research for a variety of reasons. Medical researchers may be looking to advance a new experimental drug or therapy, or they could just be trying to better understand a certain disease. Through ongoing cancer clinical trials, medical researchers are trying to find more effective methods of preventing, screening for, diagnosing, or treating various forms of cancer.
Those people who choose to take part in a cancer clinical trial are helping to contribute to the knowledge base which will one day help us develop a cure for cancer. At the same time, these clinical trial participants will be receiving top-notch medical care at no cost, while getting access to new therapies which are not available anywhere else. Also, if a new treatment is found to be effective, the participants of that study will be the first to receive this cancer treatment.
There are a number of reasons why some people would choose not to take part in a cancer clinical study; however these should not be viewed as a last resort treatment for cancer patients. Each person who takes part in a cancer clinical trial is helping to improve our understanding of a certain type of cancer. Not to mention the fact that many of the cancer treatments and therapies that we use today were only made possible through extensive research undergone in various clinical trials.
Recent Breakthroughs in Cancer Research
New Treatment for Basal Cell Carcinoma
Stanford University School of Medicine, which conducts cancer clinical trials in California, recently reported that a new drug had been approved for the treatment of basal cell carcinoma. This is a slow-growing form of skin cancer, and it happens to be one of the most common forms of cancer in the world.
The new cancer drug proved to be quite successful at shrinking basal cell carcinoma cancer cells and then preventing new ones from forming during clinical testing. The drug was actually approved ahead of schedule due to the overwhelming effectiveness it showed during the Phase 2 clinical trial. With the approval of this cancer drug, there is now an alternative to surgery available for basal cell carcinoma patients.
Early Success for Multiple Cancer Immunotherapies
A number of immunotherapy treatments showed a lot of promise during their Phase 1 clinical trials earlier this summer. These drugs could be used to help bolster the patient’s immune system, allowing it to more effectively identify cancer and attack it.
Early tests of the immunotherapies produced some very promising results in patients who had advanced stage non-small cell lung cancer, kidney cancer, and melanoma. Researchers observed a significant reduction in tumor size in about 28 percent of the patients (their condition remained stable after the shrinkage).
New Discovery with Colon and Rectal Cancer
A recent cancer clinical study has shown evidence that colon and rectal tumors constitute a single type of cancer. According to medical researchers, the pattern of genomic alterations present in the rectal and colon tissues is identical regardless of where they originated or where they are located within the patient’s colon or rectum.
Based on this new finding, researchers agree that these two cancers can now be grouped together as one. These results were obtained from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) large-scale study of rectal and cancer tissue specimens.
