Testimonials

"Life in Remission, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma"

Tami Lezak
(Breast Cancer)

The only thing more heart breaking than a diagnosis of breast cancer at the age of 29, is being told by your doctor at age 41 that it has come back and has spread to many places throughout the body. That is what Tami Lezak, mother of a 2-year old, confronted in April of 2007. Her doctors gave her little hope and she confronted the very real possibility that she wouldn’t see her son enter kindergarten.

As luck would have it, Tami’s older sister had become familiar with a cancer researcher based in Long Beach, CA who had developed a laboratory method to identify active treatments for individual patients with cancer. Tami traveled from her home in North Hollywood to the office of Dr. Robert Nagourney where he explained that cancer that had spread to lymph nodes, chest wall, liver and bone posed a serious, but not insurmountable problem. However, off the shelf therapies had almost no chance of durable benefit.

At this point, Tami underwent a biopsy, where the living cancer cells were studied in Dr. Nagourney’s laboratory. Despite the advanced state of her disease, Dr. Nagourney was optimistic about Tami’s chances. "We were fortunate that Tami’s oncologist in Glendale was very open to the use of the treatments we identified in the laboratory." Within months Tami’s tumor markers had returned to normal and her x-rays showed dramatic improvement. In early December, a followup CAT scan and PET scan revealed a complete remission. That is, all detectable disease was gone. Tami’s visit with Dr. Nagourney in mid December could not have been happier. Tami will now enter a consolidation treatment to "clean up" any microscopic disease, again using the drugs selected by Dr. Nagourney’s laboratory. Dr. Nagourney states, "We could not be happier with this excellent outcome."

This represents precisely the reason that we use laboratory methods to select treatments for individual patients. Without the assistance of laboratory guidance, this would likely have been a much less happy Christmas. Tami remains cancer free today.