London, ENG. – What if you had a proven (data driven) cocktail of approved non-cancer drugs that were saving lives but you couldn’t promote them because you can’t label them as a cancer drugs?
The private Care Oncology Clinic (COC) in London is facing that very dilemma, and they’re turning to crowdsourcing cancer clinical trials to help not only create more data to prove the non-cancer group of drugs they’ve found is shrinking brain tumors, but to also help fund treatment for those that cannot afford it.
Three years ago, Rosie Garrett was told she was going to die – with a stage four malignant brain tumor, they gave her 12 to 15 months tops. But after 3 years and a scan every 3 months, she is back to work and doing what she loves. Rosie and over 1,000 cancer patients are on the front end of taking the following MHRA approved cocktail alongside their chemotherapy that has dramatically outlived projected lifespans:
Metformin, normally given to diabetics to limit glucose overload, and statins, normally given to heart patients to cut cholesterol. Alongside these are doxycycline, an antibiotic, and mebendazole, an antiparasitic drug.
The struggle? Ethically collecting patient data in order to get approval to call this cocktail and cancer fighting drug.
The proposed solution? Crowdsource funds to fuel a clinical trial that will in turn ethically collect patient data for scientific proof this group of non-cancer drugs eliminates the cancer cells lifecycle. You can read the full story here.
The ethics approval process is not set up to consider studies that involve safe drugs already approved for other purposes and patients who have already paid anyway to have their data collected,” said Dr Bannister, who established the clinic in 2014. “It is 65 years since the first studies showed aspirin inhibited cancer, and it is still not being used. We have got to do something to break this logjam.
Why This Matters:
In our 2017 Trend Reports, we have our eyes on a healthcare trend called ‘Treat Myself’. This trend is flipping the conventional treatment algorithm upside-down, and patients and caregivers are focused on one thing: work-arounds.
This story out of London speaks to that trend directly – the COC has the beginnings of a proven cocktail of non-cancer labeled drugs that are helping people. However due to the conventional constraints of the system, they are unable to promote as such.
As 2017 progresses, it will be interesting to watch stories such as this where small population groups are potentially changing the way we treat and perhaps diagnose what once was seen as an end-of-life diagnosis to ‘you have options’.
One can only hope as these new profound ways of treatment hit the scene, there are people and or organizations ready and willing to scale these opportunities to the masses.
