New studies rely on the Internet for help treating cancer patients

New reports on two web-based cancer initiatives provide fresh evidence for the potential of the internet to give patients more influence over the research and treatment of their diseases. In one study, advanced lung-cancer patients who submitted weekly reports of their symptoms to doctors via a smartphone app lived substantially longer than those who had their disease checked in the normal way with a CT scan every 12 weeks or 24 weeks, French researchers said. After one year, 75% of patients using the app were alive compared with 49% of those who had standard doctor visits.

In the second report, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said more than 2,000 women and men have so far enrolled in a study called the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project since it launched last fall. Participants are providing medical records, tumor tissue and saliva samples to the big-data study in hopes of speeding development of more effective treatments for women with advanced disease. Metastatic breast cancer—also known as stage 4 breast cancer, when the disease has traveled to other parts of the body—causes nearly 100% of breast-cancer deaths, but only about 7% of research dollars are dedicated to this stage of the disease.