What can a patient do to help find the cure for cancer?

Childhood blood cancer (a rare disease) used to be more deadly than adult cancer, but now it's 90%+ survival rate. The reason childhood cancer research can make rapid progress is through recruiting every young patients into randomized clinical trials, which help cut the costs and shortened the time frame of drug development.

So, here's how every cancer patient (breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer) can help: get genetic tests (like foundation medicine) and get on clinical trials! Look for clinical trials so all your treatments and results can potentially make better treatment in future. Sometimes you will be randomized to the control arm, but it's ok, you are getting the minimum standard treatment.

Every early stage BC patient should consider neojuvant iSPY-2 clinical trial before surgery, and every late stage or metastatic BC patients should consider a randomized clinical trial. Patients make a difference.