Every month, I travel to the Indiana University Simon Cancer Centre in Indianapolis and return the empty packets of four weeks worth of experimental drugs, along with a diary recording the dates and times I took them. Periodic blood tests determine whether my body is tolerating the drug and whether the cancer has remained dormant.
When I signed up for this clinical trial of a medication never before used on human beings, I was informed that Phase 1 studies do not extend life. They are designed to test dosage and toxicity. Since August 2012, however, the pills, as yet unnamed, have been keeping my recurrent ovarian cancer at bay.
Because I have suffered through numerous chemotherapies, I can testify to the relative benefits of these new targeted therapies. The four pills I swallow every morning are immeasurably easier to accept than chemicals infused through the veins.
Taking an oral medicine at home is a lark compared to receiving chemotherapy intravenously in the hospital. And the side effects are much milder. Yes, I have very little hair and I am fatigued, but I don’t have to travel 100 miles round-trip to spend hours in an infusion room hooked up to toxins that zapped my brain, my spirits and my feet (which to this day remain numb and frozen).
Trained in the humanities, I do not comprehend the genomics that make such a trial possible. The meaning of the words associated with new research eludes me: proteomics, metabolomics, DNA sequencing, molecular modeling.
But my reading suggests that therapies aimed at specific gene mutations will make treatments of the future more individual and less frightful than they have been.
As scientists locate the mutations that propel malignancies, they have found and continue to search for mutation inhibitors that will reduce or kill off cancer without destroying healthy cells. Are we witnessing a paradigm shift?
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