Evaluating cancer therapies

Evaluating Cancer Therapies

Evaluating complementary and alternative therapies for cancer patients.

"Complementary and alternative" therapies are actually a vast collection of disparate, unrelated regimens and products, ranging from adjunctive modalities that effectively enhance quality of life and promising antitumor herbal remedies now under investigation, to bogus therapies that claim to cure cancer and that harm not only directly, but also indirectly by encouraging patients to avoid or po...

Evaluating novel therapies during the Ebola epidemic.

The Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreak inWest Africa poses acute and novel challenges for health policy and researchethics. Facedwith anexceptionally virulent infectious agent, limited resources, and danger to health workers, local and international authorities struggle to deployprovenpublichealth techniques thatcan limit the spread of the disease.1 In themidst of the crisis, experimental interve...

Evaluating Ebola therapies--the case for RCTs.

T worst Ebola epidemic in history is ongoing. With the number of deaths from Ebola virus disease (EVD) already in the thousands and predicted to rise to tens of thousands,1 the situation is tragic. No treatments have yet been shown to be safe and effective in patients with EVD. Some candidate therapies have shown benefit in animal models of infection, and others have shown activity against cert...

A novel model for evaluating therapies targeting human tumor vasculature and human cancer stem-like cells.

Human tumor vessels express tumor vascular markers (TVM), proteins that are not expressed in normal blood vessels. Antibodies targeting TVMs could act as potent therapeutics. Unfortunately, preclinical in vivo studies testing anti-human TVM therapies have been difficult to do due to a lack of in vivo models with confirmed expression of human TVMs. We therefore evaluated TVM expression in a huma...