Chemosensitivity Testing for Sarcomas
Dr. Leonard Wexler: Chemosensitivity testing, or testing a tumor outside the body to see what it will or not respond to, is the holy grail of cancer therapy. It's intuitive that it should work; we do it with infectious agents all the time. We grow a bacteria in the laboratory and test which antibiotics work best against it. Unfortunately, although it's been available now for three decades, it still doesn't have adequate predictive power, at least not in a clinically useful fashion. It may be a helpful screening tool to teach us which new treatments look most promising to move from the laboratory into the clinic for clinical trial, but as a tool for selecting individual drugs and dosages and schedules to treat an individual child, it hasn't fulfilled its tremendous promise yet.