Most Effective and Least Toxic Treatment
Currently, hundreds of drugs, drug combinations and targeted agents are used to treat cancer patients. With so many choices, how does your oncologist decide which ones are right for you?
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Generally, oncologists use established regimens developed through randomized clinical trials to prescribe chemotherapeutic agents. These regimens are average solutions for the “average” patient.
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Regrettably, average treatments provide average outcomes, with the majority of patients failing to show significant improvement from these protocols.
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Cancer is Unique
Each cancer patient is unique and their response to therapy is very different from one person to the next. Drugs that work for one patient may not work for another, even if they carry exactly the same diagnosis.
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One way to help identify the best treatment option for you is to submit a living sample of your cancer cells for what we call a "functional profile".
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Functional Profiling With EVA-PCD Assay
Functional profiling, is very different from genomic testing which is offered by most medical centers. Genomic testing looks for mutations and other changes in each patient's gene makeup that might guide drug selection. Although the concept is appealing, in reality, a minority of patients have genetic changes that can be used for therapy.
Functional profiling is a laboratory technique pioneered by Dr. Robert Nagourney, founder of Nagourney Cancer Institute, that measures how cancer cells respond when they are exposed to drugs and drug combinations.
It is called the Ex-Vivo Analysis of Programmed Cell Death (EVA-PCD) assay.
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Programmed Cell Death is the Key. Put simply, it is a real-time measure of which drugs cause your cancer cells to die, through a process called programmed cell death.
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By using this approach, NCI can determine in the laboratory the best drugs for each patient before they receive them.
The selection of drugs/agents used for testing are disease specific and based on your diagnosis and previous treatment history.
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NCI can customize the drugs tested based on your oncologist’s request.
A standard panel consists of 8 – 16 drugs/combinations.