When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh.
The promise of new chemo drugs got a boost in the spring when studies found that the cancer drug Taxotere, made by Sanofi-Aventis, extended survival in prostate cases from 16 months to 18 months, the first time any chemo agent had been found to extend the life of prostate patients.
We are sitting in the chipper one day, waiting for Billy to get off the phone to his mother she is in for maybe her third chemo session, and he is outside the plate-glass window trying to get good reception and his face looks so difficult, so old and childish at the same time, that the sight of him is like a pain for each of us.
During one of her chemo regimes, Barry was in a board meeting in a stifling hot room.
In the next ten months three separate chemo regimens failed to halt the cancer's voracious growth.
Dunn, so noble in her cancer battles and so reckless in her board chairmanship, says cancer and chemo did not affect her judgment.
Dunn, so noble in her cancer fight and so stupid in her board chairmanship, says cancer and chemo did not affect her judgment.
At the same conference Sugen was to present a smaller study indicating that SU5416 with chemo halted the growth of tumors in patients with advanced colon cancer for an average of at least nine months.
Avastin in colon cancer only works when combined with older chemo drugs, despite all the hype about it being a less-toxic targeted agent.
His early results suggest that in advanced cases blasting the tumor with too much chemo can backfire by allowing resistant cells to take over and kill the patient faster.
At a key cancer conference in May 2001 Crooke announced that the patients on chemo and antisense lived 16 months, compared with 8 months for patients on only chemo.
For example, Bristol-Myers and ImClone are now in trials combining Erbitux with yet another colon cancer chemo drug, oxaliplatin from Sanofi-Synthelabo (nyse: SNY - news - people ).
It extended the typical patient's life by five months more than chemo alone, one of the biggest advances in decades of treating breast cancer.
The Liverpool trial aims to find out if a tailored exercise programme and improved fitness after chemo-radiotherapy translates to a shorter stay in hospital.
We were grateful that he was in college, because this allowed him to have surgery and chemo while still on our insurance.
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Back in 2001, a plan was in the works for a study comparing Erbitux combined with chemotherapy to chemo alone for front-line use.
"There is no precedent in oncology to say that a drug would work alone but not with standard chemo, " he says.
My goal was to get in there and motivate patients so that they wanted to jump out of their chemo bed and literally start swinging at this thing.
They saw their cancer progress in a median 1.5 months, compared with 5.5 months on chemo.
Essentially, oncologists as spoken about in the article above, are writing Zytiga when the patient has not yet failed traditional chemo.
The trial tested a new chemo combination aimed at mopping up remaining tumor cells by giving patients the two drugs in wide use and adding a third, Pharmacia's Camptosar.
At the May cancer conference Genentech was expected to unveil second-stage trial results showing that its antibody in combination with chemotherapy delayed the growth of colon tumors for up to four months compared to chemo alone, and added months to patients' lives.
In stark contrast to ImClone, which rashly tested Erbitux in only 120 patients with no control group, AstraZeneca enrolled 2, 000 patients in late-stage trials to compare how long patients survive on a combination of chemotherapy and Iressa versus chemo and a placebo.
Encouraging data are also expected this weekend for an approach in which potent doses of chemotherapy are linked to antibody drug such as Roche's Herceptin to deliver chemo more directly to the tumor like a guided missile, to reduce the toxic side effects of chemo.
These are the patients who are in the top one per cent of costs because they were in a car crash that resulted in a hundred thousand dollars in surgery and intensive-care expenses, or had a cancer requiring seven thousand dollars a week for chemo and radiation.
If she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, fought through rounds of chemo and radiation to no avail, and decided against a bone marrow transplant (which, in this hypothetical situation, which reflects the vast majority of real cases, would more likely kill her than enable a cure) she would be honored and remembered as noble, virtuous and brave.
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