tHINGS TO ASK DOCTOR ABOUT IF CANCER RETURNS FROM LINDA'S ORIGINAL POST

california_artist

This was originally linda's response to news of pat nm's question regarding recurrence of cancer in lots of places after carbo/taxol treatment. I felt it was worth posting as it's own thread.

I can only imagine how you feel, although I know that each of us with cancer can imagine it all too easily as we all fear the same thing happening to us. I'm so sorry it is happening to you! (((Big HUG))). It really sounds like your cancer is VERY resistant to the carbo/taxol. Did your CA-125 continue to drop even as the cancer was growing?

Please look into them doing the assays with the frozen tissue samples they have from your hysterectomy. If your cancer cells have that EGRF protein on them, there are chemos that they can give you that specifically attact that type of cancer cell. I tried to get that type of testing done early in my chemo rounds, but my oncologist said they don't do it routinely. But I promised myself that if I had a recurrance, I would push and push until I had the tissue tested. I saved this article, which I will paste in here for you:

There is a tactic of using biopsied cells to predict which cancer treatments will work best for the patient, by taking pieces of live "fresh" tumor tissue, applying different chemotherapy treatments to it, and examining the results to see which drug or combination of drugs does the best job killing the tumor cells. A cell culture assay test with "functional profiling," using a cell-death endpoint, can help see what treatments will not have the best opportunity of being successful (resistant) and identify drugs that have the best opportunity of being successful (sensitive).

"Functional profiling" measures the response of the tumor cells to drug exposure. Following this exposure, they measure both cell metabolism and cell morphology. The integrated effect of the drugs on the whole cell, resulting in a cellular response to the drug, measuring the interaction of the entire genome. No matter which genes are being affected, "functional profiling" is measuring them through the surrogate of measuring if the cell is alive or dead.

For example, the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is a protein on the surface of a cell. EGFR-inhibiting drugs certainly do target specific genes, but even knowing what genes the drugs target doesn't tell you the whole story. Both Iressa and Tarceva target EGFR protein-tyrosine kinases. But all the EGFR mutation or amplificaton studies can tell us is whether or not the cells are potentially susceptible to this mechanism of attack. They don't tell you if Iressa is better or worse than Tarceva or other drugs which may target this. There are differences. The drugs have to get inside the cells in order to target anything. So, in different tumors, either Iressa or Tarceva might get in better or worse than the other. And the drugs may also be inactivated at different rates, also contributing to sensitivity versus resistance.

As an example of this testing, researchers have tested how well a pancreatic cancer patient can be treated successfully with a combination of drugs commonly used to fight lung, pancreatic, breast, and colorectal cancers. The pre-test can report prospectively to a physician specifically which chemotherapy agent would benefit a cancer patient. Drug sensitivity profiles differ significantly among cancer patients even when diagnosed with the same cancer.

The "functional profiling" technique makes the statistically significant association between prospectively reported test results and patient survival. It can correlate test results that are obtained in the lab and reported to physicians prior to patient treatment, with significantly longer or shorter overall patient survival depending upon whether the drug was found to be effective or ineffective at killing the patient's tumor cells in the laboratory.

This could help solve the problem of knowing which patients can tolerate costly new treatments and their harmful side effects. These "smart" drugs are a really exciting element of cancer medicine, but do not work for everyone, and a test to determine the efficacy of these drugs in a patient could be the first crucial step in personalizing treatment to the individual.

Author/Speaker/Performer :Larry Weisenthal, M.D., Ph.D.; Contact information: phone: (714) 596-2100. Link: http://weisenthal.org/Weisenthal_ESCIa.pdf Source : Eur J Clin Invest 37 (suppl. 1):60, 2007