Experimental Cancer Treatment

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Kenneth Fink. I'm a Medical Oncologist at Zimmer Cancer Center, at New Hanover Regional Medical Center, in Wilmington, North Carolina. Experimental therapy of cancer is one of the most important aspects of treatment, of cancer in general. We try to put as many patients on experimental therapy as we can. We've succeeded in probably five or ten percent of our patients who need treatment, going on experimental therapy. In pediatrics, the percentage is much higher. In adults, it's a little bit more difficult because a lot of patients have a lot of other problems, and they're not eligible for protocols, and for trials. The important thing about experimental therapy, is that we learn a great deal about how to treat cancers a lot better. We tend to use national protocols whenever we can. What that means, is we take patients from all over the country, and put them on protocols, put them on experimental protocols, with special treatments for cancer, and by bringing more and more patients together, and having a greater number of patients on trials, we get more information, so the more patients that go on trials, the better. Some of the most important things we learn, are whether certain drugs are better than other drugs, or whether a combination of drugs may be better than other drugs, or combinations of drugs for various kinds of cancers. The most important cancers we do this in of course, are the more common cancers, like lung cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer, but really all areas of cancers, even some that are very rare, need to have experimental therapy available. When patients come in for care, we usually try to offer them experimental therapy as our highest priority, and patients that do go on experimental therapy, we take as the most serious patients. We pay, if you will, the greatest attention to them, and give them extra help. We have extra research nurses, and extra people around to be sure that folks who are undergoing experimental therapy, are taken care of the best, so there's a big incentive if you think about it, for patients to be on experimental therapy, because they'll be getting a lot of extra help. Their care is given in a very specialized way, that's very rigid, and we try not to break any of the rules, and make sure everyone is getting exactly the same treatment, and then we can compare them among the other treatment protocols that we're doing, and that way we can tell whether the experimental treatment is better, and that's really what I think people need to know about experimental therapy."