Research on the Therapy of Cancer

Major advances in cancer therapy are attributable to clinical trials. There are two types of clinical trials: prospective and nonprospective trials. In prospective trials, subjects are allocated to two or more groups. One group serves as a “control” and receives whatever therapy is considered to be “standard” for the disease being studied. Standard therapy may be treatment with one or more drugs or, alternatively, no treatment. For example, the therapy given to patients in the control group of a clinical trial testing new treatments for metastatic carcinoma of the colon (colon cancer that has spread to distant organs) consists of the drug 5-fluorouracil. In contrast, standard therapy for the control group of patients with carcinoma of the colon that has not spread to distant organs is observation with no drug treatment. The other group(s) in the trial receive(s) the treatment(s) being tested. These may be a novel dose schedule of drugs known to have some effectiveness against the cancer being studied or a new drug not previously tested in the particular cancer.