ICON9 Trial - check up the tenth and last - 14 September 2021

Jitteriness continued and with good cause it turns out.
The scan I had on 9 September shows a couple (or three?) small nodules but also a 5cm mass in my lower abdomen which is causing the bowel symptoms. Dr M explains this as the olaparib keeping a lid on things relapsing in a widespread way but that some cells have become olaparib resistant.
This marks the end of the ICON9 trial for me.

It feels like a bit of a rushed consultation but it looks like I have two choices:

1. Go onto the next line of chemotherapy which would be carboplatin (again) plus  gemcitabine - a three -weekly regimen but with an extra infusion of gemcitabine in the middle of the cycle, meaning something every 10 days; or
2. Enter a Phase 2A trial which would mean going back on olaparib plus a nanoparticle, being trialled by Ellipses Pharma, as yet unlicensed and known only as EP0057. As I understand it,  the nanoparticle is a complex sugar molecule wrapped round a chemotherapy agent called camptothecin which is too toxic to use in the ordinary way. I'm not quite sure how the nanoparticle reduces the overall toxicity while retaining the toxicity for the cancer cells...

Hanging around the cancer  milieu I've picked up a general exhortation which goes,"If you're offered a trial, take it." I don't know how that pans out in general, but in this case it means I'm being offered an extra potential line of treatment.  I can move from it to the third line of chemo (1 above) but not the other way round. So it's now or never for this particular trial. It seems like a reluctant no-brainer but I go home with the 18-page Patient Information Sheet to make my way through. I'd like to say 'peruse but that sounds much too relaxed and I'm a long way from relaxed.

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