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The Whittingham Cancer Center at Norwalk Hospital is pleased to usher in National Lung Cancer Month by being the first in the world to activate an important new study for patients affected by the disease.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Most patients with lung cancer are diagnosed when the disease has spread to other regions of the body, such as the bones, liver and brain, said Dr. Richard Frank, director of cancer research at Norwalk Hospital. This stage of the disease is referred to as "advanced" or "metastatic" lung cancer and is not curable by currently available methods of treatment, he explained.
Most patients with advanced lung cancer are treated first with chemotherapy drugs. These treatments may work for some time but ultimately, other types of therapies are required to control the cancer. A medicine called Tarceva (Erlotinib) is a pill approved for the treatment of lung cancer after chemotherapy has ceased working and is in the category of cancer fighting medicines called "targeted therapies" that attack one or a few specific molecules in the cancer cells. Tarceva is able to control the cancer in approximately one-third of patients; ultimately, its effectiveness also wears off.
The pharmaceutical company Pfizer is testing a new drug called PF-00299804 in a new clinical trial that is opening in many sites in the US and around the world. PF-00299804 attacks the same growth pathway in cancer cells as Tarceva. But, PF-00299804 also binds to additional molecular targets in the cancer cell and binds to these with great potency. It is hoped that PF-00299804 will improve the control of lung cancer in patients who have received chemotherapy but this can only be determined in clinical trials such as this one. The trial will compare the effectiveness of Tarceva to PF-00299804; both drugs will be provided free of charge.
Dr. Richard Frank, medical oncologist and Director of Cancer Research at Norwalk Hospital states that "we are proud to have been selected to participate in this study and to make it available to our patients in such a timely fashion. Anyone in our region who has been diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer should consider participating in this trial."
For information on this and other cancer research studies at Norwalk Hospital, contact Linda Versea, APRN at 203-855-3517 or Jennifer Long, APRN at 203-852-2996
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