Trial Information for Caregivers
When your loved one has prostate cancer, it can be difficult to know what to do or where to turn. Prostate cancer is a disease that may require lifestyle adjustments for patients as well as their families and caregivers. Learning more about prostate cancer can help you and your loved one to better cope with the challenges of his disease and learn about treatment options.
Learn more about what you can do as a caregiver
If your loved one decides to participate, he will work with a research team. Team members may include doctors, nurses, social workers, dieticians, and other health care professionals. They will provide his care, monitor his health carefully, and give him more specific instructions about the study.
If your loved one is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer, he may be eligible to participate in the READY trial if he has:
- Prostate cancer that has spread (metastasized) and progressed
- Undergone surgical castration or is currently undergoing hormone therapy
- No previous chemotherapy (except estramustine) to treat the spread of his cancer
About READY: A clinical trial for metastatic prostate cancer patients (CA180227)
The purpose of the READY trial (CA180227) is to assess whether the addition of dasatinib to docetaxel improves the overall survival of men with metastatic prostate cancer. All patients participating in this study will be treated with docetaxel, and half of all patients will also receive dasatinib.
Docetaxel is a chemotherapy that has been approved by many regulatory agencies, including the FDA, for the treatment of metastatic prostate cancer, and is generally considered a standard treatment for this disease. Docetaxel, in monotherapy, is not considered an experimental treatment, as it may have been prescribed to treat your loved one's prostate cancer. Other medications normally given to patients taking docetaxel are prednisone and dexamethasone, which are also not considered experimental treatments.
Dasatinib is currently approved by many regulatory agencies, including the FDA, for patients who have chronic, accelerated, myeloid blast and lymphoid blast chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Dasatinib is currently being studied in adults who have solid tumor cancer(s), including metastatic prostate cancer, and is considered an "experimental treatment" for metastatic prostate cancer.
You and your loved one should talk to your doctor to learn more about the READY (CA180227) research trial.
To see if there is a Clinical Trial Site near you, click here.
To learn more about helping as a Caregiver, click here.
To learn more about additional prostate cancer clinical trials, click on the link below.
NCT00861614 (lpilimumab)