Trial Guide
Researcher Tom Marsilje is helping fellow colorectal cancer patients sort through clinical trials.By Kate Yandell
When Tom Marsilje was diagnosed with stage IIIC colorectal cancer in 2012 at age 40, he had been conducting drug discovery research for more than 15 years. The day of his diagnosis, researchers presented data from the first clinical trial in humans of a lung cancer drug he had co-invented, now approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as Zykadia (ceritinib). When Marsilje’s cancer recurred after initial treatment, eventually resulting in a stage IV diagnosis, he started to research clinical trials for his own cancer type.
Marsilje lives in San Diego with his wife and two young daughters and works at a research institute associated with the pharmaceutical company Novartis. He searched for open trials of colorectal cancer treatments on clinicaltrials.gov, a registry maintained by the National Institutes of Health. He got 1,200 results. “I was very intimidated and freaked out because where do you start with 1,200 hits?” he recalls. “I didn’t really fully recognize how intimidating and difficult it is for a patient to find a trial and to successfully enroll in the trial until I switched my viewpoint and became a patient.”
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