Virginia Filipan was only 58 years-old when she learned she had stage IV lung cancer. She had lost her two sisters, brother and husband to cancer, so she thought the logical thing would be to start planning her last few months. However, Virginia met Robert Nagourney, MD, medical director at Rational Therapeutics, and he had a slightly different plan.
It all started with a lingering cough and a bad case of bronchitis just after Christmas 2005. When the prescribed antibiotics were making Virginia worse her physician ordered a chest X-ray. He thought he saw something suspicious. A subsequent PET (positron emission tomography) scan confirmed his fear, Virginia had lung cancer and it had spread to her bones.
[Like many others diagnosed with lung cancer, Virginia was not a smoker. She worked in a night club and believes exposure to second hand smoke may have been the cause.]
As Virginia began to research her treatment options she kept hearing about Dr. Robert Nagourney. Dr. Nagourney, and his staff at Rational Therapeutics, use chemosensitivity testing to determine which drug or combination of drugs will most effectively treat a patient’s specific cancer. By exposing each patient’s cancer cells to different chemotherapies, the “assay” tailors treatment to each patient’s unique profile of sensitivity and resistance, therefore improving outcomes.
“We need to be thinking out of the box to get good, meaningful advances,” says Dr. Nagourney. “If you administer the right medication to the right patient, you get a good response. You turn off that which causes those cells to survive and grow.”
From the results of her assay, Dr. Nagourney prescribed a once-a-day chemotherapy drug that Virginia has been on ever since. “Today, everyone tells me I’m a walking miracle,” she said.
Hope Practiced Here 