Penny,
I'll pray that you have the most amazing good news from the scan after TDM1. And that you have a looooong run of shrinking mets and happy scan results like Lorraine.
I read about a lab in Greece that determines the best chemo by separating circulating tumor cells from your blood sample and then doing what Rational Therapeutics does with live tumor spheroids - checks to see which chemos are most effective at killing cancer cells.
It was written up in Defeat Cancer:
Chemotherapy Sensitivity Testing
Two patients with the same type of cancer can be sensitive to a whole different array of chemotherapeutic agents, so instead of grouping all of our patients together and giving them all the same agents, we do chemotherapy sensitivity tests. These determine the specific chemotherapy agents that their tumor cells may best respond to. There are two labs that we use for this purpose; one is in Greece, the other is in Germany. The lab in Greece is called Research Genetics Cancer Center (RGCC). Here, they extract circulating tumor cells from patients’ blood samples, culture them out, and then expose them to different chemotherapeutic agents. Results are then calculated according to the percentage of cancer cells that are killed by the agents, which may be 50 or 80 percent of a culture—or none. Then they choose the agents that the cancer cells have the highest response rate to and recommend that these be used for treatment. The labs can also provide comprehensive information on the genetic makeup of people’s cancers, which helps us determine appropriate therapies for our patients. Once we have this information, ideally, we will put together two different treatment regimens for each of our patients, with each regimen consisting of three different medications, which we alternate. The purpose of doing this is to reduce the cancer cells’ resistance to the drugs. It takes ten days for the results of the Greek test to come back. Another advantage of this test is that only a blood sample is required to do it, rather than tissue from the tumor itself, so unlike some types of chemotherapy sensitivity testing, it’s safe to use in those with metastatic disease.
I know you have reactions to many of the treatments. This may be a bit unorthodox, but it may also improve your chances beyond 20-30% that the harsher treatment would work.
I discovered it on my friend's doctor's website:
http://cancerbooksource.com/defeat-c...er-strategies/
Well nice to know liver failure is pretty painless. I'd rather that not apply to you!
Fingers crossed and direct line open to God . . . .