Experimental cancer treatment

Experimental cancer treatments are medical therapies intended or claimed to treat cancer by improving on, supplementing or replacing conventional methods (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy).

The entries listed below vary between theoretical therapies to unproven controversial therapies. Many of these treatments are alleged to help against only specific forms of cancer. It is not a list of treatments widely available at hospitals.

The twin goals of research are to determine whether the treatment actually works (called efficacy) and whether it is sufficiently safe. Regulatory processes attempt to balance the potential benefits with the potential harms, so that people given the treatment are more likely to benefit from it than to be harmed by it.

Medical research for cancer begins much like research for any disease. In organized studies of new treatments for cancer, the pre-clinical development of drugs, devices, and techniques begins in laboratories, either with isolated cells or in small animals, most commonly rats or mice. In other cases, the proposed treatment for cancer is already in use for some other medical condition, in which case more is known about its safety and potential efficacy.

Clinical trials are the study of treatments in humans. The first-in-human tests of a potential treatment are called Phase I studies. Early clinical trials typically enroll a very small number of patients, and the purpose is to identify major safety issues and the maximum tolerated dose, which is the highest dose that does not produce serious or fatal adverse effects. The dose given in these trials may be far too small to produce any useful effect. In most research, these early trials may involve healthy people, but cancer studies normally enroll only people with relatively severe forms of the disease in this stage of testing. On average, 95% of the participants in these early trials receive no benefit, but all are exposed to the risk of adverse effects. Most participants show signs of optimism bias (the irrational belief that they will beat the odds).

...
Wikipedia