Has anyone ever heard of Champions Oncology? -- They put your tumor in mice and try different treatments to see if the cancer reponds?
Never heard of it. Sounds like an interesting idea...
3 to 6 months sounds like a long time to get an evaluation though :-( The other possible downside is that the mice are immuno-depressed and I am not sure how that impacts the results. After my 1st lung surgery, a sample of my tumor was sent to a company testing its sensitivity to different chemo drugs. The results didn't come as a surprise: it stated ifsofamide and doxorubicin were the drugs the most likely to work. I'd be afraid you'd get the same kind of result...
That does sound very promising, I have never heard of it either. I heard of a patient finding an effective drug combo from taking a chemo assay test through Rational Therapeutics http://www.rational-t.com/, and I found this to be an interesting article on chemo-sensitivity and chemo-resistance testing (http://sarcomahelp.org/learning_center/chemosensitivity.html). But this seems like something totally different. My local oncologist has sent tumor samples to Caris Target Now http://www.carislifesciences.com/oncology-target-now for Molecular profiling, and this has been helpful to some patients. I would be very interested in doing molecular profiling, and chemo-sensitivity testing. I wish that molecular profiling were commonly done during clinical trials so that information could be kept and analyzed for patterns.
Thanks for the insight... I just keep looking for new ideas!
I apologize I didn't comment on this thread earlier.
Feel free to contact me either on this site or via email (brianmarkmcgrath@gmail.com) if you would like to discuss this in more detail.
We used Champions when my son was diagnosed about two years ago. When my son had his tumor removed, a sample of tissue was provided to Champions for use in doing tumorgrafting on mice. In our case, none of the mice were 'successfully' able to grow tumors, so we don't have experience with testing of treatment options using their services.
I can tell you that we were met with a fair amount of skepticism on this approach by our primary oncologist as well as others we consulted with. The general response was that, weighed against larger scale clinical trial results, these personalized treatment suggestions would not be as compelling. So, while we weren't in a position, thankfully yet, to test this, I suspect that any suggestions we were provided by Champions would likely have been ignored.
I will say that they were very professional, although communication and updates on progress were not very frequent. And, of course, this is very expensive.
Brian
Hello,
I just found this discussion about Champions Oncology. I was wondering, have anyone tried this procedure lately?
As a brief update, the mice trials that were planned by Champions were not fruitful. That is, they were unable to successfully grow tumors on mice from the tissue samples we provided. I cannot say whether this is a common issue or not.
We also participated (separately) in a study at Dana Farber. More details can be found at the link below:
http://www.dana-farber.org/Research/Featured-Research/Profile-Somatic-Genotyping-Study.aspx
One of the benefits of this option is that it was no expense to us--we merely needed to sign certain waivers and provide slides (tissue samples) and have blood drawn. In our case, this profiling did not yield any significant, individualized results, but that is not necessarily the case for all patients.
My son has not had any recurrence, so we have not been in a position to test any results.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Was it for no expense for this, because you have participated in the study, right? When was it?
Because applying individually this procedure costs a fortune... :(