President Joe Biden recently announced a new federal goal to reduce the cancer death rate by at least 50% over the next 25 years. It's a bold goal, and I applaud it.
According to the CDC, over the past 20 years, cancer death rates have declined by 27%, from 196.5 to 144.1 deaths per 100,000 population. That's the good news. Now for the bad: in 2022, you're no more likely to survive five years with advanced solid cancer like pancreatic or lung cancer than you were when my 1955 Model 41D Buick Special rolled off the assembly line in Detroit.
As Biden pointed out, we need to be able to figure out which combinations of treatments work best for a particular person. As things stand, Biden said, we know very little about why a treatment works for some patients and not for others with the exact same cancer diagnosed.
Drugs that work for one patient may not work for another, even if both patients have the same diagnosis. This is why each patient should be tested to select the most effective and least toxic drug regimen for that individual before initiating treatment
The President's accomplishments are commendable and dovetail nicely with the successes we have had in using human tumor tests to select the best chemotherapy drugs and combinations for each patient.
Reviews:- My response read full article targeted drug combinations are the next big advance in cancer treatment.
As the president said, drugs that work for one patient may not work for another, even if both patients have the exact same diagnosis. Therefore, each patient should be evaluated to select the most effective and least toxic drug regimen for that individual before starting treatment. This is an approach the cancer industry must now take.
To determine the best drug combination or sequence, I believe the cancer industry should apply human tumor explantation tests like our ex vivo programmed cell death test. This provides a dynamic assessment of cancer cell response by using live cancer cells from each patient to select chemotherapy drugs. Although the concept may seem new to some, we have successfully applied this technique to over 10,000 patients, many with difficult-to-treat cancers, and doubled their chances of a response.
One of the reasons this works, as the president pointed out, is that every cancer patient is unique and the response to treatment is very different from person to person. When patients are treated without testing, treating physicians must rely on general guidelines and protocols that cannot capture the individual characteristics of each patient.
Ex vivo tests for programmed cell death are markedly different from the tests offered by most medical centers that rely on DNA profiling known as genomic testing. These use the patient's chromosomal material to look for mutations and other changes in each patient's genetic makeup that could guide drug selection. Although the concept is attractive, in reality only a minority of patients have genetic changes that can be used for therapeutic purposes.
Every human cancer reflects all of its genes, both mutated and normal, acting together to create what we recognize as a malignant tumor
Only functional analyzes can capture every patient's tumor in real time and provide information that can inform drug selection and treatment decisions.In a study we conducted in metastatic lung cancer where the average response rate is 30% with traditional generic treatment, patients had a response rate of 64.5% (p<0.001) when they received drugs selected for them in the laboratory, increasing their survival from months to years.
The role of the laboratory and the functional profile is to ensure that the most effective and least toxic treatments are selected the first time. This improves the likelihood of response and may help avoid toxic treatment options when other, milder drug combinations appear to be effective.
Widespread application of this technology has the potential to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, reduce wasted care, and optimize drug development. We agree with President Biden that we need to change the way we treat cancer. Testing human tumor explants may be the answer the president seeks.
