New Studies Rely on the Internet for Help Treating Cancer Patients
In one study, advanced lung-cancer patients who submitted weekly reports of their symptoms to doctors via a smartphone app lived substantially longer than those who had their disease checked in the normal way with a CT scan every 12 weeks or 24 weeks, French researchers said. After one year, 75% of patients using the app were alive compared with 49% of those who had standard doctor visits.
In the second report, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said more than 2,000 women and men have so far enrolled in a study called the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project since it launched last fall. Participants are providing medical records, tumor tissue and saliva samples to the big-data study in hopes of speeding development of more effective treatments for women with advanced disease. Metastatic breast cancer—also known as stage 4 breast cancer, when the disease has traveled to other parts of the body—causes nearly 100% of breast-cancer deaths, but only about 7% of research dollars are dedicated to this stage of the disease.
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In the French study, 133 patients from five cancer centers in France were randomized to either reporting symptoms weekly with the app or the standard CT scan every three months. The app participants recorded their status on 12 symptoms including fatigue, pain, cough frequency and weight loss. An algorithm in the app analyzes the responses and sends an alert to the doctor if it senses a likely relapse. That prompts a call to the patient to come in for a checkup and possible changes in care.
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The researchers found that 77% of the app patients were otherwise in good health when the relapse was detected compared with 33% in the standard CT arm of the study and that they got early supportive care as a result.
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In the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project, participants fill out a brief questionnaire and consent form that allows the research team to obtain medical records and stored tumor samples. The database will be widely available to other cancer researchers, said Nikhil Wagle, a researcher at the Broad and Dana-Farber institutes and director of the project.
The study has already identified small groups of patients who have had exceptional responses to existing drugs, who were young when they were diagnosed or whose disease had already spread beyond the breast when it was discovered, Dr. Wagle said. Researchers now plan to look for molecular and other clues that might reveal, for instance, what is different about young women who get metastatic breast cancer or patients who respond to treatments that have little benefit for others.
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