Alternative Therapies For Lung Cancer
What is a 'clinical trial'?
A clinical trial is one of the final stages of promising research. Many of the modalities that come have to then be tested on patients. There is a variety of clinical trials out there that look at prevention, detection, and treatment for lung cancer.
How can I find out about current clinical trials for lung cancer?
Current clinical trials can be searched on the web through the National Cancer Institute website. It is very user friendly and for the public to search for current clinical trials in lung cancer.
What are 'Specialized Programs of Research Excellence' or 'SPORE'?
The SPORE Program called the Specialized Programs of Research Excellence are designations made by the National Cancer Institute, and along with that designation comes a large grant that supports research endeavors into lung cancer. Currently, there are 7 sites in the country for lung cancer. UCLA is one of those sites, and all of these programs push innovations and promising differences that set standards of care ideally and bring about promising from the laboratory directly to the patient that impacts on prevention, detection and treatment for lung cancer.
What is 'immunotherapy'?
Immunotherapy is a form of biologic therapy where we utilize the patient's own immune cells and boost the patient's immune cells to attack and fight off the cancer cells. There's a number of ways that the lung cancer inhibits that response and blunts that immune response to the cancer cells, and this allows the cancer to grow. So immunotherapy is currently under investigation and is a potential therapy in the future, but currently it remains investigational.
