The Trouble with "One Size Fits All"

Cancer Drug Treatments

In clinical trials, a group of patients with the same type of cancer are treated with a specific anti-cancer drug.  If a certain percentage of patients benefit from the drug it is then adopted by physicians as an appropriate treatment for any patient who has that type of cancer.  The percentage of patients who must benefit from a drug could be as low as 20% or as high as 80%, depending upon the type and stage of cancer involved.  In any case, the goal of clinical trials is to identify drugs that help the "average" cancer patient.

The problem with that approach is that no cancer patient is average.  Every cancer patient is unique.  Likewise, every patient’s cancer is unique.  That's why doctors routinely find that some patients benefit from a certain drug while other patients do not.  Same drug, same diagnosis, different patient, different treatment response.  Doctors also see many patients who fail to benefit from one treatment regimen do better when switched to a different regimen. 

The point is, it doesn't matter that a certain drug works for 80% of patients if you are among the 20% for whom the drug doesn’t work.  The situation becomes even worse for drugs that are known to help only 30 or 40 percent of patients who receive it.  It means 60 to 70 percent of  patients will receive the drug needlessly.  These patients  incur unnecessary drug side effects and treatment expense. Worse still, valuable treatment time is wasted while their cancers progress.

Today, many different chemotherapy drugs are widely-accepted for use within the same cancer type.  For example, the National Cancer Institute lists approximately 30 chemotherapy regimens for the treatment of breast cancer.  The NCI does not recommend any one of these regimens above any other.  The situation is similar in other cancer types.  So how does a physician choose? 

A cancer physician always takes into account what type of cancer a patient has, how far it has advanced, and what, if any, other types of therapy, such as surgery, radiation, and/or chemotherapy, the patient received previously.  The physician also takes into account known drug toxicities, the patient’s age, weight, physical condition and other clinical factors that might affect the patient’s ability to receive certain types of drugs.   However, none of these factors can show if a patient will benefit from a specific chemotherapy drug or drug combination.

In contrast, Personalized Cytometric Cancer Profiling examines the widest possible range of biological factors as they occur in real-time within and among the actual cancer cells of each cancer patient, as an individual.  A cancer patient may then receive a chemotherapy treatment that is personalized specifically for him or her, based upon objective evidence that the drugs he or she receives were effective at killing his or her own cancer cells. 

Cancer patients are not statistics and they are not “average.”  Each patient is a person with a unique identity and a unique cancer cell biology.  No person should receive a cancer treatment on the uncertain premise that it worked for some portion of patients who received it previously.