A study of growth hormone levels and responses to chemotherapy

Please note - this trial is no longer recruiting patients. We hope to add results when they are available.

Cancer type:

Bowel (colorectal) cancer

Lung cancer

Non small cell lung cancer

Oesophageal cancer

Status:

Closed

Phase:

Other

This study is looking at levels of growth hormones in the blood before and after chemotherapy. It is for people who have bowel cancer, non small cell lung cancer or cancer at the junction of your food pipe and stomach ( gastro oesophageal cancer).

Doctors are now looking for people with bowel cancer to take part.

More about this trial

Doctors often use chemotherapy to treat cancer. It may help to control cancer symptoms and can help people to live longer. But over a period of time, the drugs may stop working. This is described as the cancer becoming resistant Open a glossary item to the drugs. Drug resistance means that chemotherapy helps some people more than others. It would help doctors to know in advance of giving the treatment who is most likely to benefit from chemotherapy.

One thing that may affect how well chemotherapy works is the level of growth hormones in the blood. Growth hormones are proteins that send signals to cells telling them to grow.

In this study, the researchers want to find out:

if they can measure changes in the levels of growth hormones in the blood of people having chemotherapy
whether different growth hormone levels affect how well chemotherapy works

Who can enter

You can enter this trial if you:

have bowel cancer that is stage 4, non small cell lung cancer that is stage 3b or stage 4, or gastro oesophageal cancer that is stage 2, 3 or 4
have cancer that can be measured on a CT scan
are going to have chemotherapy
finished any earlier chemotherapy at least 24 weeks (nearly 6 months) ago
are well enough to be up and about for at least half the day (performance status 0, 1 or 2)
have satisfactory blood test results
are at least 18 years old

You cannot enter this trial if you:

have had radiotherapy, surgery (apart from a biopsy ), or an experimental drug in the last month
can’t have standard chemotherapy
are taking part in another clinical trial looking at an experimental treatment
have any other condition which the study doctors think could affect you taking part

Trial design

Everybody taking part in this study has chemotherapy. The treatment you have will depend on the type of cancer you have, but you will have standard treatment Open a glossary item for your cancer type and stage. Taking part in the study does not change your treatment in any way.

Doctors are currently looking for people with bowel cancer. They hope that around 40 people will take part. Everyone has 3 blood tests on the first day of their chemotherapy. They have the tests:

before starting chemotherapy
about 2 hours after starting the treatment
and about 4 hours after starting treatment

They will also have blood tests 2 weeks later if they are at the hospital for a routine visit on that day. The researchers hope this will help them work out the best time to measure an increase in growth hormone levels.

If there is a sample of cancer tissue available from when you had surgery or a biopsy Open a glossary item , the study team will also measure the levels of growth hormones in this tissue.

Hospital visits

Taking part in this study will not involve any extra hospital visits. Your doctor will be able to explain how often you need to go to hospital to have chemotherapy and any other tests or scans.