Tania’s Story

by Tania S.

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I am an Emergency Department physician and I am also an ovarian cancer survivor. As is often the case, my diagnosis came out of the blue, with minimal symptoms and at an advanced stage. Unfortunately, like most women with advanced ovarian cancer, I recurred after three years of remission. However, unlike most patients, I had the advantage of taking a personalized medicine approach through The Clearity Foundation. After my second surgery, The Clearity Foundation profiled my tumor and provided new information that led my doctor to change the chemotherapy drug she was going to prescribe, to one that was more likely to work against my tumor. In addition to this drug having greater clinical benefit, an unexpected bonus was that I tolerated this new treatment much better. In addition to helping to empower women with personalized diagnostic information to help make more informed treatment decisions, Clearity is working to improve treatment in the future. Women who are profiled by Clearity contribute data on their treatment history and clinical outcomes into Clearity’s privacy-protected research database. Clearity’s database is a rich resource of data that can be used to analyze treatment patterns and drug responsiveness to improve the way ovarian cancer is treated routinely. Precision medicine is not just a futuristic concept, it’s already reality for many types of cancer.

I believe it is an absolute necessity for difficult to treat cancers (like ovarian) where we have seen far too little progress in improving survival in decades.