Talk:Experimental cancer treatment

Reovirus
I've been following this company with interest for some time now:  I'm surprised they're not listed on this page. Does it belong somewhere else or should it be added? 97.126.250.119 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 22:26, 30 July 2009 (UTC).


 * I have been editing the Oncolytic Virus page where reovirus as a therapy is detailed. Perhaps this page could benefit from a section on oncolytic viruses in general? I already tried to add it but it was removed, I would appreciate some discussion on it. Viraltonic (talk) 02:01, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Unregistered user's POV changes
I see that some changes I made a couple of months ago have been reverted. There's a whole lot of POV stuff in here, and the material is lifted wholesale from an external source (which, I might add, is linked twice in the footnotes). I'm going to clean it up. Rhombus

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Gene therapy
 * totally blank here! that's a surprise...

The recently added "CAM" section in this article suffers a deficit of concrete facts which mentions "therapies" and "substances" but should mention some particular techniques, to at least orient the reader, and should mention those that are specific to cancer (the main article Complementary and alternative methods also suffers such problems). I have attempted to rewrite the section as less of a sales pitch for CAM and more factually oriented, but it still needs more work. -- Lexor 08:48, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Rife's "Beam Ray"
I recently learned about another 'dubious' cancer treatment that deserves mention here. Royal Raymond Rife invented a "Beam Ray" that has unfortunately become somewhat popular again. Google for 'Rife' and cancer and you'll see what I'm talking about. Anyone (knowledgable) care to add an entry? I guess I could take a shot, but I'd prefer not to. --Dan 18:34, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Hm. That's a new one to me.  While it may be appropriate to mention the most prominent crackpot theories in this article, I was under the impression that it was really meant for the more mainstream or 'serious' avenues for research.  If we wanted to incorporate a blurb on every single dubious theory, this article would get awfully big.  Perhaps we should have a List of alternative cancer therapies, or something...? --TenOfAllTrades(talk) 21:51, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Insulin potentiation therapy
I reverted additions to the section on IPT that suggested that the University of Illinois had proven the mechanism of action of IPT, and the implication that efficacy had been demonstrated. Although some IPT practitioners may have received degrees (MD, PhD) at the University of Illinois, I haven't seen evidence from UI supporting IPT itself.

The quoted statement from the NCCAM "The most likely positive outcome would be to show that this therapy is as good as standard chemotherapy but significantly less toxic, which would be a major contribution to humanity and medicine" is misleading&mdash;that is a testable hypothetical outcome, rather than any statement of efficacy. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:28, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Are Alternative Treatments really "Experimental"?
The Gerson Diet and Insulin Potentiation Therapy are alternative cancer treatments. I have seen nothing experimental about them. They are not part of formal Phase 1-4 trials or translational research. It is doubtful that these or any other alternative therapies should qualify for inclusion on this page. Delete? Jellytussle 00:07, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Angiostatic based treatments
How is this still listed as an experimental cancer treatment? Avastin (bevacizumab) was shown to produce a survival advantage in advanced colon cancer in a phase III trial. Should this paragraph be deleted from the article? &mdash;Brim 02:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * This whole page needs critical review. See also my comments above. Jellytussle 17:01, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Merge from Alternative Cancer Treatments
I found the page in question at Special:Deadendpages. I don't know how useful the content is, but if you feel it would help this article, please include some of it here. After the merge is done, the other page can be changed to a redirect. - Bobet 21:41, 25 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Disagree. Neither page is satisfactory, but the merge would not help. Firstly, alternative cancer treatments are rarely experimental. This is due to lack of scientific rationale, and lack of clinical trial intent, let alone clinical trial data. As such, several of the paras in this page should be trimmed out. Re the current page, it might be better if the "experimental treatments" are discussed under a more general heading of Cancer research, possibly with a section on Translational research, phase 1 & 2 trials, new classes of drugs etc.Jellytussle 22:37, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Disagree with merge. Some of the alternative content here should be moved to that page.-- John DO | Speak your mind  11:07, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I am a little confused about the purpose of this page vs. the alternative cancer treatments page. It seems that the idea is that experimental cancer treatments are being designed with the intent of FDA approval, and are based in science, whereas alternative cancer treatments are not necessarily based in conventional science or on the pathway to FDA approval. However the definition in this article is "non FDA approved cancer treatment" and the definition for the alt cancer treatments is "cancer treatments that have not been approved by the government agencies responsible for the regulation of therapeutic goods." That seems pretty similar. In addition, several of the things on this page, including hyperthermia, are indeed FDA approved. Theyellowdart22 (talk) 01:08, 13 November 2019 (UTC)


 * The "definition" was boldly added by a new editor and is wrong. I've removed it.  However, the general idea is correct, if you are looking at it specifically at a point in time.  Every normal cancer treatment that we have today was "experimental" from the day it was first created until the day that the FDA/EMA/similar agencies around the world declared that it was "approved". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:19, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Cleaning the article out
Much of this article is outdated. Some of it belonged at Alternative cancer treatments. As a first effort, I have removed any drug that isn't currently being studied (i.e., with curative intent, not to manage side effects or for other purposes) according to https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/clinical-trials/search/

If anyone else wants to take a similar approach to other sections, I think that would be helpful.

Overall, IMO this article needs a little less about specific individual drugs and more about general concepts (e.g., p53 activation as a category of research, and maybe link to a few specific drugs as a passing mention). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:25, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Please update with: new and missing experimental treatments
Please update the article with info from/about these studies / their researched categories of experimental treatments. They are currently included in 2022 in science like so:

Progress in the treatment of cancer: A very small trial shows complete remission of a type of colorectal cancer without surgery and radiation in all 12 patients. On the same day, results of a trial show that trastuzumab deruxtecan therapy for HER2-low metastatic breast cancer exceeded results from chemotherapy. The synthesis of ERX-41, a novel compound that has shown promise in eliminating cancer cells, is reported (2 June). Researchers describe a new light-activated 'photoimmunotherapy' for brain cancer in vitro. They believe it could join surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy as a fifth major form of cancer treatment (16 June).


 * There's probably also quite a few other types / categories of treatments described/demonstrated to notable level in trials/studies that are missing.


 * The section "Studying treatments for cancer" could also have some more info about how, who, where, to what extent, by what means and why such treatments are studied – for example how it's funded, the needs/motivations for doing so, metascience identified problems & open questions such as reproducibility issues, 21st Century Cures Act and diagrams (maybe via Scholia or OpenAlex).


 * Please also see my related & similar proposal at Talk:Cancer biomarker


 * I agree with User:WhatamIdoing that "Cleaning the article out" is needed. Somebody should update the included info.


 * I'd suggest some publicly-funded non-profit independent cancer-related organization/researcher (e.g. NHS, WHO, NCI, EORTC, etc) gets tasked with updating, maintaining and cleaning the article but other people could do this instead (instead of only additionally).


 * It is missing info on useful/efficacious/potentially efficacious sometimes well-researched options of "Complementary and alternative treatments". If they are only useful in combination and/or in combination with more conventional/more intensive treatments they can be informed about in this section. Here I'm also referring to (various ultimately specific applications of) AMPK and cancer, and Diet and cancer.


 * Once the article is in a good state, it should get far more views from people interested in this which I think are far more than the ~500 per month currently reading the article. Not sure how it would be achieved, maybe increasing the quality of the article makes it more visible to search engines. It may also require good redirects, wikilinks from other articles, and so on instead or additionally too.


 * At least once the article is in a good state, Treatment of cancer should properly inform about basically all of the article's content in a brief way, Maybe transcluding the first paragraph of most sections would be a good solution here, at least it would be good to not leave out various specific experimental treatments instead of at least naming them and not to have relatively excessive details on some other specific treatments.

Please comment what you think below.

Prototyperspective (talk) 14:28, 3 August 2022 (UTC)


 * From a quick look none of these sources meet the required WP:MEDRS standard for biomedical content. Some drugs (e.g. dostarlimab) already have entire articles. So yes, I too would agree some "cleaning out" would help. Alexbrn (talk) 14:42, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * This isn't necessarily about the specific studies but more about their category of treatments. The info could still be included if reviews have info about these categories of treatments and/or if a medical organization like the WHO reviews+informs about them.
 * For example, for the first study, the article could briefly mention that PD-1-blockade and/or (types of) antibodies(/antibody-drug conjugates) are being researched with a MEDRS source...maybe even also mentioning the medication in specific if there is a MEDRS source.
 * The point of this article basically (i.e. at least one of its points) is that there's not articles about experimental cancer treatments buried somewhere in WP, but that these are integrated, aggregated and made findable here (this doesn't mean that all relevant WP-articles down to each and every potential medications/protocols/targets/... are linked here – especially not as a plain nonnested list – of course). Prototyperspective (talk) 15:04, 3 August 2022 (UTC)