Active clinical trials for "Nasopharyngeal Neoplasms"

Many normal tissues, including the eyes, brain, and spinal cord are very close to cancers in the nasopharynx. The dose of radiation delivered to the cancer is limited by tolerance of these normal tissues. Standard radiation treatment techniques using three or four radiation beams cannot avoid delivering some dose of radiation to these normal tissues that do not need to get radiation. Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) uses many hundreds of computer-controlled radiation beams aimed at your cancer to try to lower the amount of radiation that normal tissues receive, while still delivering the desired amount of radiation to your cancer and to areas that your doctor thinks may have cancer cells. The doctors at Princess Margaret Hospital are conducting this study in order to test whether the use of IMRT techniques can improve the chance of controlling your cancer in the head and neck region.

Chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyposis (CRwNP) is an inflammatory disease of the nasal mucosa. It is presented with severe stuffiness, nasal discharge, facial pressure/pain, and sleep disorders. It leads to severe inconvenience to social life and the quality of life. The first step standard medical therapy consists of the topical intranasal or systemic corticosteroids. Surgery should be considered in the case of medical treatment failure. However, the recurrences are common after both surgery and medical therapies in severe disease and usually require revision surgeries or high dose corticosteroid regimens. On the contrary, either the revision surgeries or the high dose corticosteroid therapies are not capable of preventing the recurrences, treatment failures. Besides, revision surgeries usually lead to high complication rates and high dose corticosteroids usually cause severe adverse effects. The use of the short course topical intranasal corticosteroids after the surgery is generally advocated for these patients. However, the recurrence rates are still high. Hence a new and effective maintenance treatment algorithm with no severe adverse effects is required. The hypothesis of the clinical trial is an estimated symptom recovery and superiority in both efficacy and safety by the use of low-dose methylprednisolone or methotrexate as compared to the standard maintenance therapy in treatment-resistant CRwNP patients. Therefore, the results of the present study are believed to provide data on novel maintenance therapy and suggest an alternative to the topical intranasal corticosteroids or the high-risk revision surgery.

This study will evaluate the efficacy, safety, tolerability, and effect on quality of life of oral capecitabine in combination with intravenous (IV) cisplatin in participants with metastatic nasopharyngeal cancer. Participants will receive up to 8 cycles of capecitabine treatment, and cisplatin will be administered on the first day of each cycle. The anticipated time on study treatment is up to 24 weeks, and the target sample size is 44 individuals.

This is a phase I, dose escalation trial of MVA-EBNA1/LMP2 vaccine across a pre-defined range of doses in patients in remission having had an EBV+ nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).

RATIONALE: Drugs used in chemotherapy use different ways to stop tumor cells from dividing so they stop growing or die. PURPOSE: Phase II trial to study the effectiveness of carboplatin and paclitaxel in treating patients with locally recurrent or metastatic nasopharyngeal cancer.

Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP) is an autosomal dominant disorder characterized by the formation of multiple adenomatous colorectal polyps usually in the teenage years. Virtually, all patients with FAP will develop colorectal cancer on average by the 5th decade of life if prophylactic surgery is not performed. Besides, these individuals must have lifelong cancer surveillance of the remaining colorectum or ileum. Use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), such as sulindac, or celecoxib, which selectively inhibits prostaglandin synthesis primarily via the inhibition of cyclogenase-2 (COX-2) have been shown to reduce the incidence and induce regression of adenomas in the rectum of patients with FAP. However, use of NSAIDs and COX-2 inhibitors is associated with significant comorbidity including renal and gastric toxicity and increased risk of vascular events. Therefore, identification of a chemopreventive agent that would have similar efficacy but less toxicity would enhance our ability to treat these patients. Therefore the following specific aim has been proposed:To determine in a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study the tolerability and efficacy of curcumin to regress intestinal adenomas by measuring duodenal and colorectal/ileal polyp number, and polyp size in patients with FAP.

This is a pilot phase II study of locally advanced or metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) with the single drug Alimta. The objective of this study is to assess efficacy and safety profiles of Alimta as 2nd line treatment for patients with advanced NPC.

This phase II trial is studying how well oxaliplatin works in treating young patients with recurrent solid tumors that have not responded to previous treatment. Drugs used in chemotherapy, such as oxaliplatin, work in different ways to stop tumor cells from dividing so they stop growing or die.

This study will examine the effectiveness and side effects of an experimental vaccine to prevent recurrence of nasopharyngeal cancer. The likelihood of this cancer returning is higher in patients whose original lesion was large, whose cancer had spread to the adjacent lymph nodes, or who had surgery for metastatic disease (cancer that spread beyond the primary site). Nasopharyngeal tumors are caused by a common virus called Epstein-Barr virus, which produces a protein called LMP-2. Vaccination with specific pieces, or peptides, of the LMP-2 protein may boost the immune system's fight against the cancer. The vaccine injections are mixed with an oil-based substance called Montanide ISA-51, which is intended to increase the immune response to the peptide. Patients 18 years of age and older whose nasopharyngeal cancer has been controlled by standard treatment with surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation therapy and who are currently free of disease may be eligible for this study. Candidates are screened with a physical examination and blood and urine tests. x-rays and other imaging studies are also done in patients who have not had these tests recently. All candidates are tested for HLA tissue type. Only patients with type HLA-A*1101 or HLA-A*2402 - the types on which the two vaccines in this study are based - receive vaccine therapy; others are offered standard medical treatment and observation. Participants are randomly assigned to receive injections of one of two different vaccines (LMP-2:340-349 or LMP-2:419-427) to determine which peptide may offer the best immunity. Each treatment course consists of weekly immunizations for 8 consecutive weeks. The injections are given under the skin of the thigh. After every other treatment course (about every 3 months), patients undergo a series of x-rays and scans to look for tumor. The immunizations are given at the NIH Clinical Center. Patients are monitored for 1 hour after each injection and have blood tests and a physical examination to look for treatment side effects. Immunizations may continue for up to 12 months as long as the cancer does not return. Patients are followed with blood tests every 12 weeks to monitor body functions. They also undergo leukapheresis-a procedure to collect white blood cells-before starting treatment and about 3 to 4 weeks after the fourth vaccine to evaluate how the vaccines affect the action of the immune system cells. For this procedure, blood is drawn through a needle in the arm, similar to donating blood. The blood is processed by a machine that separates and removes the lymphocytes (white blood cells), and the rest of the blood is returned through a needle in the other arm. Patients not receiving the vaccine also undergo leukapheresis to assess their natural response to LMP-2. Some patients may have a biopsy-surgical removal of a small piece of tissue under local anesthetic-of normal skin and tumor or lymph node tissue to examine the vaccine's effects on the tumor immune cells. Patients who show no evidence of immunization against the LMP-2 protein after two courses of vaccine treatment are subsequently be followed with observation alone. Those who do respond to the vaccine are offered two additional courses of treatment to strengthen the response or to be followed by observation alone. Patients whose disease recurs after completing the first two treatment courses are taken off the study and referred back to their local physician or to another study, if an appropriate one is available.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether very high dosages of chemotherapy will improve the chance of surviving cancer.