FREQUENTLY
ASKED QUESTIONS

In general, our observation is that many patients that come to our clinic have unfortunately not been offered a follow-up therapy in their home country, even though a precision-based therapy would have been available also outside Germany based on the patient’s biomarker profiling. Currently, the German health system seems to be more patient-focused and can provide patients a better individualized therapy evaluation and obviously a better access to new treatments for difficult cases. Too many patients face limitations in their home country health system. Patients, who would most likely benefit from a precision-based therapy have been denied a precision-based medicine approach, because e.g. the trial has already stopped recruiting, or the patients do not meet all eligibility criteria from the clinical trial, etc. Sometimes patients tell us that their tumors are too small for particular clinical trials, or they need to be off any treatments for a longer time before they can enter a prospective trial. And so several patients unfortunately deteriorated significantly while waiting for a clinical trial, developing i.e. brain metastasis, and then got excluded from the further evaluation of the clinical trial. And these patients feel then mislead by their oncologists in their home country.

Medical colleagues elsewhere persist on chemotherapeutic regimens and protocols that have been established years ago. These protocols may achieve a “good overall result“ – but they do not think about whether it would be possible to achieve even better or more durable results for those patients. While some patients respond well to a certain chemotherapeutic protocol, and do not experience severe side effects, others need to discontinue the standard protocol due to terrible side effects, or they progress under the standard protocol. Alternative protocols for these patients, that did not tolerate the standard chemo regimen, are limited. And if the patient then develops complications on the alternative chemo protocol, options become really scarce. In contrast, worldwide there are so many ongoing clinical trials with cancer drugs, showing amazing results in advanced clinical phases. But as long as these drugs are not approved, or only available if you pay for them privately, these drugs will not be provided to other patients who have already exhausted all available standard treatment strategies and are in immediate need for further options, as they are rapidly progressing. But the problem is that these new clinical trial drugs do not even come into question for these kind of heavily pre-treated and further progressing patients and are therefore not discussed with the patients due to country-specific limitations and laws, thus depriving patients of possibly life-extending or even life-saving treatments.

Patients are often told by their physicians, that immunotherapy does not make sense in their cases. In most cases, due to country-specific regulations, the physicians simply do not have access to various immunotherapeutic therapies. Fortunately, the Hallwang Clinic has access to most advanced immunotherapies and is therefore able to design a personalized and tailored treatment protocol, based on individual information that we retrieve from a number of diagnostic tests. These specific diagnostic analyses give us information on surface markers expressed on tumor cells, individual tumors´ mutations, amplifications, translocations etc. Identification of these tumor characteristics allows us to specifically target them through a broad range of therapeutic options based on your individual test results. You have to look at the tumor itself to understand what targeted treatment the patient needs. A treatment that might work for one cancer patient does not necessarily work for another patient, even though they have both the same type of cancer.

In general, right away – depending on room availabilities.

We provide towels, hair dryers and shower items. The only thing you perhaps need to take with you (if not provided in advance), is your latest medical report, including details of your medical history, your medication and allergy list, as well as scan images on discs, if available.