Tag: Biological therapy

A type of treatment that uses substances made from living organisms to treat disease. These substances may occur naturally in the body or may be made in the laboratory. In cancer, some biological therapies stimulate or suppress the immune system to help the body fight cancer. Other biological therapies attack specific cancer cells, which may help keep them from growing or kill them. They may also lessen certain side effects caused by some cancer treatments. Types of biological therapy include immunotherapy (such as cytokines, cancer treatment vaccines, and some antibodies) and some targeted therapies. Also called biological response modifier therapy, biotherapy, and BRM therapy.

16Oct 2017 by Ronny Allan 2 Comments

Opinion: Neuroendocrine Cancer – Can it be cured?

Awareness, Living with Neuroendocrine Cancer, Patient Advocacy, Survivorship, Treatment

OPINION:"Cured" - In cancer, this word can evoke a number of emotions. Interestingly, not all these emotions will be as positive as you might think. If you want to spark a heated debate on a Neuroendocrine Cancer patient forum, just mention that you've been cured. I'm not taking any sides by using this statement, just stating what actually happens and the deeply held views that persist in community groups. One important factor in some of this thinking is that many people still remember the days where most diagnoses were late and many followed years of misdiagnoses for other conditions. But the latest statistics (and even these can be said to be quite old) indicate things are changing. The massive increase in incidence rates indicates earlier diagnoses and it's true for…

We can survive without a gallbladder, but clearly it is a useful, functioning organ, and we are better off to keep it if we can. There are times when things can go wrong such as gallstones, sludge and blocked ducts, and then it may need to be removed. However……even though there wasn’t really anything wrong […]

Neuroendocrine Cancer Clinical Trial – Lutetium-177Lu (Satoreotide)

What is Satoreotide? It’s an agonist treatment. i.e. a ‘next generation’ radiologand for Peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) or more specifically the radiopharmaceutical that binds to both activated and unactivated somatostatin receptors which are upregulated on these tumours. There is far higher binding via this mechanism than standard octreotate. The technical name of the radiopharmaceutical […]

A review of September 2023 on RonnyAllan.NET – Living with Neuroendocrine Cancer

On my website RonnyAllan.NET, September was an interesting month because I had pushed out some blogs before I went on a planned overseas holiday from 6th – 25th Sep and then pushed out some more on return. This had the effect of producing higher figures than August. Normally holidays mean lower figures. I’m thankful to […]

Never mind the Bollocks – here’s the cancer

I don’t tend to share some very personal stuff, but this is on the boundary of that rule and there are some important messages to be teased out. For those who follow my blog in detail, you may remember the post entitled “Neuroendocrine Cancer – Signs, Suspicions, Symptoms, Syndromes, Side-Effects, Secondary Illnesses, Comorbidities, and Coincidences” […]

First and only FDA-cleared, fully automated chromogranin A assay

There has been controversy about the utility of Chromogranin A for many years now. Specialists have been critical about its use but to be fair even those less critical still confirm that alone it would not be trusted to formally diagnose Neuroendocrine Cancer. That said, it was still controversial when certain US guidelines were updated […]