So Friday afternoon had a meeting with Dr. Gillison, and she has let me know that early next year she will be the lead investigator on new trials using these drugs in primary treatment. The trials will essentially look at PDL-1 drug with radiation and cisplatin, PDL-1 with radiation and Erbitux ( in patients that have the marker for effectiveness of EGFR inhibitors), with PDL-1, radiation and no chemo. So those trials will allow these to get into the primary treatment realm likely as early as next fall if they have the same impact as they did in these failing patient trials. The future is brighter, and this is just the beginning of the types of therapies. They will also need to start genetic profiling of patients like they did for EGFR, so we can target just the patients in which this pathway or future ones is implicated in the original disease. A decade from now there will be an armamentarium of monoclonal antibody type drugs out there that will have efficacy in very specific patients that show a susceptibility to that particular one working in them.

While OCF has played a very small role in this as millions of dollars have been thrown at this idea from multiple sources, we have been players in small financial donations to research, and most importantly driving patients to the clinical trials that were so successful. We almost filled one trial by ourselves, and I am very grateful that those that we referred felt some comfort in following our recommendation, and that so many of the people that interact with OCF have come to donate what they can to not only keep OCF alive, but to allow us to contribute to things like this that we find promising. In the previous post I eluded to the Xmas ask letter that got mailed out to many people, If you would like to read it since it chronicles a little bit about how OCF came to be and what it has become you can follow this link. http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/holiday/index.php