A Note From Our Founder

I have spent a long career trying my hardest to provide the cancer patient with the best in standard therapies that can be offered. But I have been disappointed too often when standard of care therapies are not enough. Over many years, I have also kept my eyes open to the advances going in research labs to see what benefit might be applicable to my patients. Remarkable advances continue to take place, especially in the last few years. It is now time to bridge the gap between the lab and bring research into the cancer care clinic. Physicians and researchers alike now know that each tumor is unique. It is known that we no longer have to depend on cell lines as representative of the patient’s tumor since most tumors from individual patients can now be grown in culture. Testing capabilities can now be applied to the patient’s own tumor. These capabilities are now reaching industrial scale. Genomic assessment is not enough. Functional testing on living tumor tissue outside of the patient’s body should be a must before we make choices and put drugs into patients’ bodies. Additionally, access to individual blood products, cryopreserved tumor tissue, and to patients who are becoming alert now to the opportunities of applying research to his or her cancer care opens the door to the future of options that extent benefit beyond standard of care options. Personalized cancer vaccines and adoptive cell therapies are on the horizon. The patients who take advantage of this state of affairs will be the ones to go to the head of the line. I believe that most physicians reading this will agree that we have been stymied in so many ways in providing innovation to our patients. Our mission at SpeciCare is to provide individual patient and physician access to these remarkable advances. Finally, the gulf between research and clinical care is narrow enough for us in the clinical cancer care community to reach across and bring these innovations to the clinic where the doctor and the patient live. Please consider this opportunity to provide benefit to our patients beyond the “standard of care.” If what we are offering here – saving tumor tissue, providing access to trials and innovative therapies, doing our best to bridge that gulf — makes sense to you; if you would offer these services to your spouse or your family members, please offer them to your patients as well. We can step up and make a difference. It is time. Thank you, Ken Dixon, MD, FACS