[medicare]

The eighty extra days is for the group in the study, not the "individual" patients treated in the real world. One person may live two days, another two-hundred additional days. What may work in some patients, may not work in other patients.

What's good for the group may not be good for the individual, affirms that in the tactic of using "fresh" biopsied cells to predict which cancer treatments will work best for the individual patient, this "smart" drug has to get inside the cells in order to "target" anything.

If the "targeted" drug either won't "get in" in the first place or if it gets pumped out/extruded or if it gets immediately metabolized inside the cell, it just isn't going to work. Each of these new "targeted" drugs are not for everybody. Even when the disease is the same type, different patients' tumors respond differently to the same agent.

If a drug works extremely well for a certain percentage of cancer patients, identify which ones. If one drug or another is working for some people (not average populations) then obviously there are others out there who would also benefit.

Upgrading clinical therapy by using drug sensitivity assays measuring "cell death" of three dimensional microclusters of live "fresh" tumor cells, can improve the situation by allowing more drugs to be considered. The more drug types there are in the selective arsenal, the more likely the system is to prove beneficial.

Drug sensitivity tests support the idea that a marginal benefit in terms of overall survival is observed in cancer patients with normal prognoses, but there are marked survival benefits for cancer patients with poor prognoses.

What is needed is to sort out what's the best profile in terms of which patients benefit from this drug or any other drug. Can they be combined? What's the proper way to work with these new drugs?

Every cancer patient should have his/her own unique chemotherapy trial based on consultation of pathogenic profiles and drug sensitivity testing data. Having some foreknowledge of a given agent's expected result before its administration would benefit the individual patient.