Hi Barbara,
Finally getting to answer your question...
>I'm going to an
>oncologist at Sloan Kettering next Tuesday and will be asking him about the
>alternate therapies you mentioned (monoclonal antibodies, transfer factor,
>interleukin 2, adoptive immunotherapy, etc). I would really appreciate it
>if you could direct me to the sites on the internet that provide the best
>information.
>
In general, I'd recommend using the NCI's clinical trial searchable data
base at the following address:
http://cancernet.nci.nih.gov/prot/patsrch.shtml
if you haven't already found it. It's very easy to use..just select which
type of cancer you're looking for and which type of therapy for each search
and it'll pull up however many clinical trials are out there, then select
whichever ones look most appropriate to review in more detail.
I had heard about monoclonal antibodies from a friend who is undergoing that
kind of therapy for colon cancer, so I searched in the NCI's database to see
if there was anything being done for lung cancer...it turns out only for
"advanced" disease...
with the other items, transfer factor,
interleukin 2, adoptive immunotherapy, etc, I either saw them in the list of
therapies in the NCI search engine, or in the case of adoptive
immunotherapy, it was mentioned by Diana in a MOL mail message a few weeks
ago. I'm quoting it below:
>Dear Carla and Torie
>
>Welcome. I just received newsletter from ICAR (International Cancer Alliance)
>with article I thought you both might be interested in.
>Lung Cancer after surgery- A new immunotherapy used in combination
>with conventional treatments appears to significantly increase survival rates
>in
>patients with operable lung cancer. The procedure, adoptive-immunotherapy
>with interleukin (IL-2) and Lymphokine-activated killer (LAK) cells, is
>combined
>with either chemotherapy or radiation therapy as a follow-up to surgery.
>"In a study involving 174 lung cancer patients, the new procedure was tested
>head-to-head with the standared treatments. The standard treatments compared
>were: no adjuvant therapy (when the surgery was considered "curative");
>radiation alone or chemotherapy alone (when the surgersy was "noncurative").
>The overal 5 year survival rates for patients using the new immunotherapy
>procedure were reported to be 54% versus 33% for the conventional treatment.
>The 9-year survival rates were similar 52% for the immunotherapy treatment
>versus
>24% for the conventional.
>Further analysis of 5-year survival rates showed the following comparisons
>between
>the treatments.
>Cancer Category Immunotherapy Conventional
>"Curative" 65% 41%
>"Non Curative" 43% 21%
>Adenocarcinoma 47% 23%
>Squamous cell 62% 35%
>>From CANCER July 1997
>
>Hope this is something you can check on and will help you out.
>Take care
>Diana
Usually with these more immune-system-related approaches, the clinical
trials I could find were Phase I or at most Phase II trials, and they tended
to require that one have "measurable or evaluable" disease in order to
participate.
The other key source I've been using is healthgate at
http://www.healthgate.com/HealthGate/MEDLINE/search.shtml
where you can search multiple databases for articles on various topics such
as immunotherapy and NSCLC, etc. This gives you lists of articles that you
can click on to get abstracts of the article...to actually get the full text
of the article it costs $25.00 or $30.00, but you can usually get the gist
from the abstract.
Hope this helps. I'll be very interested to hear of anything you find
that's promising and available to Stage II patients..
All the best,
Torie
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