Our Collaborations
The Nagourney Cancer Institute
What is The Nagourney Cancer Institute founded by Dr. Robert Nagourney?
It was October of 2019 when I first met with Dr. Nagourney and requested his help for our Fibrolamellar community. Tapping into his lifelong work of helping many different types of cancer patients, I felt he could add a component that was missing from our FLC medical community by utilizing his proprietary functional profile testing and help in creating a customized FLC assay. I was very happy he took my initial call, agreed to meet and we have been collaborating on assisting FLC patients ever since.
Learn how the Nagourney Cancer Institute approaches cancer research in this informative video.
What they do
- We analyze your living cancer cells to find out the drugs, combinations, and sequences that are most effective for you.
- This reduces the guesswork in selecting your cancer treatment by measuring how your cancer cells will respond to drugs BEFORE you receive treatment.
- This helps select the most effective and least toxic drug regimen for your cancer.
Why use the Nagourney Testing
- Accomplished cancer research and testing facility with a fully accredited federal and state-licensed laboratory.
- State-of-the-art personalized cancer testing which helps select the most effective and least toxic cancer treatment.
- They also work with pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms to streamline their research and development process for bringing new compounds to market.
What have we discovered since our first test results in March of 2020.
- Combinations of drugs appear to have a much greater synergy than any single agent alone.
- Many of the Fibrolamellar tumor samples tested, especially those samples from the primary liver tend to be very necrotic. We are still trying to find answers why this might be.
- We have narrowed down the potential useful targets from over 50 single agents and drug combinations to about half of that. Interestingly we have included supplements, and drugs not thought to have a place in cancer care, for example Celecoxib, Phenformin, Acetazolamide along with others. The small molecule KAT-101 invented by Dr. Ko has shown a high degree of sensitivity to viable FLC cells. As a result of using this compound in our FLC assay Dr Nagourney’s lab began using this same compound in multiple other cancer types and has discovered varying degrees of sensitivities to those as well.
Contact Dr. Paul Kent paulkentmd@fibrofighters.org or Tom at tom@fibrofighters.org if you will be having an upcoming resection, paracentesis, or a thoracentesis to relieve the pressure caused by ascites. We have found ascites fluid to be rich in viable cells and it makes for an excellent assay. We can provide you with all the details, help with consents and assist your oncologist with any special drug requests they may wish to add.
Special Note
FibroFighters Foundation receives zero compensation or kickbacks of any kind from the Nagourney Cancer Institute and has found it extremely disturbing that certain researchers would claim this to be the case. As a matter of fact, Tom our founder and Executive Director desires to help every patient who would like the test but does not have the financial means to do so. In the first couple years this funding would come directly from Tom and Carries personal funds.
To learn more and visit the Nagourney website click the links below
https://www.nagourneycancerinstitute.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZICSmcqPu1I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypt5X2AFbDg FibroFighters visits the Nagourney Cancer Institute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAGhNhrHMJs Dr. Nagourney Tedx Talk
Meet Dr. Robert Nagourney
Dr. Robert Nagourney is an internationally recognized pioneer in cancer research and personalized cancer treatment.
With more than 20 years of experience in human tumor primary culture analyses, Dr. Nagourney has authored more than 100 manuscripts, book chapters, and abstracts including publications in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Gynecologic Oncology, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Over the past 20+ years, Dr. Nagourney and his team at the Nagourney Cancer Institute have developed a laboratory technique, functional profiling, that measures how cancer cells respond when they are exposed to a wide variety of drugs and drug combinations.
By using this approach, the Nagourney team can determine the best drugs for each patient before they receive them. This reduces the guesswork in selecting the right drug treatment for you and is why our analysis is more powerful than genomic testing offered by most centers.
