Ongoing cancer clinical trials are being conducted all over the world. As medical researchers learn more about these diseases, we inch closer and closer to developing a comprehensive cure for cancer.

2012 has been a great year for medical research in general, but researchers have been seeing some very positive outcomes in the field of cancer clinical research. In the present world, many of us have been touched by cancer in some way or another.

With every year that passes, medical researchers are working together to develop better cancer treatments and therapies, which have been helping more and more people defeat their illness. Nowadays a diagnosis of cancer is no longer a death sentence.

Advancing Treatment for Cervical and Throat Cancer

Medical researchers from Queen’s University in Belfast made a recent breakthrough which could help us develop a better form of treatment for patients with throat and cervical cancer. According to their scientists, the cells in the non-cancerous tissue are inherently programmed to send messages to neighboring cancer cells, which actually encourage them to invade the area. Medical researchers believe that they can inhibit the spread of cancerous cells by switching off the non-cancerous cell’s ability to send out these messages.

While the initial research at Queen’s University has focused on treating throat cancer and cervical forms of cancer, scientists believe that this breakthrough could be used to treat many more forms of cancer. The researchers who conducted this cancer clinical research will be looking to test it further as soon as possible.

New Breast Cancer Drug

Over the summer, medical researchers in the UK made some significant advancements in their breast cancer clinical research. They have been developing a new drug for breast cancer patients which has the ability to keep the cancer at bay for a longer period of time than the current available treatments. They are still conducting extensive clinical trials on this breast cancer drug, but the news will surely bring newfound hope for anyone who has been affected by breast cancer.

The new drug has been tested in a number of medical centers all across the world, one of which being the Freeman Hospital located in Newcastle. These cancer clinical studies have shown that this breast cancer treatment is also capable of significantly reducing the side effects of chemotherapy. There are still plenty of more tests to be run on this cancer drug, referred to as T-DM1, but this discovery has already been heralded as a major step forward for cancer research.

Breakthrough in Pancreatic Cancer Research

Pancreatic cancer is a very deadly form of cancer which has been notoriously resistant to almost all forms of chemotherapy which have been used to treat it. Nearly 50,000 people are diagnosed every year with pancreatic cancer, and about 40,000 of them will end up succumbing to their disease.

So far, medical researchers have been baffled by pancreatic cancer, as the drugs which are capable of killing it in the petri dish are not able to kill the cancer cells in patients. However, scientists from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center may have found our best chance of treating pancreatic cancer to date! They discovered that the pancreatic tumor causes an intense inflammatory reaction in the patient. Due to this reaction, other cells end up forming scar tissue around the pancreatic tumor. While this was first thought to be good, as it may inhibit the cancer’s ability to spread, the researchers now know that it was actually preventing the chemo from reaching the tumor.

So, the scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, which conducts cancer clinical trials in Washington, have discovered an enzyme which should be capable of breaking through this scar tissue shield. Early clinical trials on mice have shown that this enzyme could be incredibly effective at allowing the chemotherapy to have direct access to the pancreatic tumor!