Lung Cancer Clinical Trials: Research Studies to Bring Better and Safer Treatments

Many lung cancer clinical trials are sponsored by government agencies, private pharmaceutical organizations and health care institutes worldwide. In USA, the specific agencies and institutes involved in clinical trial sponsorship are the Department of Defense (DOD), National Institute of Health (NIH), and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Today, some organizations are devoted to recruiting volunteer participants to these experimental studies. With enough info guide and explanation, patients are now more aware, knowledgeable and willing to participate in clinical trials.

These clinical trials are being researched to develop new treatments for Lung Cancer. The medical studies give access to cutting-edge treatments at no cost to the participants. There are more than 200 clinical trials being conducted including a Cancer, Three Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy in Treating Patients With Stage I Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer and A Randomized Trial of Adjuvant Chemotherapy With or Without Bevacizumab for Patient's with Completely Resected Stage IB (>4 cm) - IIIA Non Small Lung Cancer.

Among the various revolutionary clinical trials being held, let us highlight the collaborative advanced stage tissue lung cancer (Castle) study at the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute at San Carlos, California. The objective is to conduct research and laboratory tests on cancer tissue and blood samples by cancer victims. After collection, these samples and clinical information will be stored at the ALCMI Biorepository and Data Repository.

Around 250 advanced stage lung cancer participants from the United States and some from Europe are targeted. They are those in Stage M1A and M1B Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) and all stages of small cell lung cancer (SCLC). If you are qualified and accepted, you will be asked to provide your medical profile, tumor tissue and blood samples.

As a preliminary entry requirement, your study physician will submit your tissue to a testing laboratory. Once the test reports come in, the results are indicated in your health file records as a guide for your doctor to plan your care and treatment. When there are changes in your treatment, new blood samples and latest medical information will be requested from you and there will be communication between you and your doctor every three months for an update on your health status. Whatever research reports collected about you will not be imputed in your research records.

The other featured clinical trial is the Radiation Therapy in treating patients with extensive small cell lung cancer being held at Sparta, New Jersey. The primary objective of this research is to make a comparative 1-year overall median survival rate between patients with extensive stage small cell lung cancer who are treated with prophylactic cranial irradiation and those who are treated with platinum based chemotherapy but without a consolidative extracranial radiation therapy. Its secondary goals are to compare adverse effects of the treatments in the patients, evaluate patterns of failure, compare the time to first failure and evaluate the percentage of radiotherapy dosage.

To be eligible, you must be diagnosed within the past 6 months of extensive stage SCLC and must have 1-3 extracranial metastatic lesions. Another criterion is you must have completed 4-6 courses of platinum-based-chemotherapy within the past 8 weeks and have partial or complete response to chemotherapy. You must also have no progression and no limited stage SCLC even if the illness has progressed and no brain or CNS metastases.

Their criteria for other characteristics for females are not pregnant or nursing, negative pregnancy test and must use contraceptives during fertility stage. Participant must have no severe, active co-morbidity such as acute bacterial or fungal infection requiring lV antibiotics and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbation or other respiratory illness requiring hospitalization. You must also pass the required zubrod performance, ANC, platelets, hemoglobin, Serum ALT and AST, Serum Bilirubin and Serum Creatinine.

After your participation in these lung cancer clinical trials study is completed, you will be provided with appropriate follow-up care and assistance. To start with, you need to pass the prerequisite entry and once accepted, you will be a part of history in the making in advancing medical research for Lung Cancer for better and safer treatments in the future!

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'Panoramic View' of Lung Cancer Gained From Latest Trials

Results from three recent genome-sequencing trials have provided a revolutionary insight into the deadly disease.

Lung cancer is responsible for more deaths than any other form of the disease. Fewer than 20% of the 1.6 million cases diagnosed across the globe every year are still alive five years later.

The trend in new studies focuses on personalised treatment. Genome-sequencing trials are used to match the best possible treatment to the specific genetic make up of a patient's tumours.

In the latest trials, researchers analysed tumour tissue samples from 183 patients suffering from lung adenocarcinomas, 178 suffering from lung squamous cell carcinomas and drilled-down studies of 17 tumours from smokers and non-smokers.

Author of two of the studies, Ramaswamy Govindan from the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, said:

"For the first time, instead of looking through a keyhole we are getting a penthouse panoramic view,"

He added that previous studies had already looked more closely at personalised treatment but focused on a small number of genes. In contrast, the recent studies gleaned data across an entire genome.

Professor Govindan, who specialises in Medical Oncology believes that these kinds of "cataloguing studies" will revolutionise the way lung cancer clinical trials are designed. Instead of huge, expensive trials that feature a diverse collection of mutations, smaller studies will laser-down into patients' tumours according to their specific mutation. Medical experts are expecting this tailored therapy to be more beneficial for patients suffering from cancer.

The advances of such studies are clear - generic treatments tend to have a far greater number of side-effects as they are simply designed to kill any rapidly dividing cells rather than only attacking the ones spreading the disease. Furthermore, data from the targeted studies not only forms the basis of new treatments, they can cast light on those ones already on the market.

Drugs that treat adenocarcinoma, the strain behind 40 per cent of lung cancer cases, have already been approved. However, there are no approved drugs for treating another very common form of cancer, squamous cell carcinoma. Lung cancer clinical trials based on data from the recent targeted studies could be used to approve existing marketed drugs for the treatment of squamous cell carcinoma according to Matthew Meyerson, a researcher from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts who also worked on the trials:

"The data that are really going to be informative is when you combine genomic data with outcomes of targeted therapies."

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