Innovation Pharmaceuticals Inc (IPIX)

[slcimmuno]

Yes am sure she would have - like these patients, Inc Michael Becker — all prob would have liked B-OM as a 30% or better preventative treatment option ...

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Mucositis Help Needed

Hey all, I need your help with anything you can reccommend. I have been given, a morphine oral every 4 hours(barely works 5 min.), lidocaine swish and spit every 2 hours wich numbs for about 10-15 min., biotene mouthwash does nothing for the pain???and using nystatin just because, taking pill pain relievers. My lips, mouth, tounge, under tounge feels like razor blades, talking hard, sleep little but upon wake wanna little sips is all i can do. even crushed banana too difficult, any reccommendations other than the doctors just work through it?
September 21, 2010 at 3:35pm MDT by Mark (14 comments, 2695 views)

https://markct63.blogforacure.com/weblog/2010/09/21/0001

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https://mdbcancerjourney.com/tag/oral-mucositis/

Accordingly, when one is diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, the immediate concern is whether or not the individual will be able to survive the disease. For me, however, the bigger concern was surviving the treatments and their side effects. In particular, my experience licensing and launching a product to treat oral mucositis made me very familiar with this debilitating side effect from both radiation and chemotherapy.

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Yesterday marked the beginning of Week #3 for my chemoradiation treatment. By now, the cummulative effects of daily radiation have started to appear.  This includes oral mucositis (where the mucosal lining of the mouth breaks down forming ulcers) and xerostomia (dry mouth). The World Health Organization (WHO) Oral Toxicity Scale measures anatomical, symptomatic, and functional components of oral mucositis¹. The scale ranges from Grade 0 (no oral mucositis) to Grade 4 (unable to eat solid food or liquids). The majority of head and neck cancer patients (83%) who are receiving radiation therapy develop oral mucositis and 29% develop severe oral mucositis².

My current assessment would be WHO Grade 2, which means that I can still eat solid foods despite the presence of ulcers (see photo of the single ulcer on the side of my tongue). Recall that I started taking Caphosol® at the start of my chemoradiation treatment. This oral rinse has been shown to reduce the severity and duration of oral mucositis in a clinical study. The study design used a different oral mucositis scale devised by the National Institute of Dental andCraniofacial Research (NIDCR), which ranks oral mucositis on a 0-5 scale where I would presently be at Grade 2 (single ulcer <1 cm). Results from the study demonstrated a peak Grade 1.38 for patients using Caphosol compared to Grade 2.41 for the placebo group. Accordingly, it will be interesting to see whether or not I develop additional ulcers or more severe oral mucositis to help determine the benefit of using Caphosol.

When I first licensed the North American marketing rights to Caphosol® in October 2006 (see press release), I had no idea that nearly a decade later I would be a customer. The product is intended to treat some of the common side effects from cancer chemotherapy and radiation – both oral mucositis (inflammation of the mucous membranes in the mouth with symptoms ranging from redness to severe ulcerations) and xerostomia (dry mouth). While these side effects can occur as a result of various treatments, they are particularly prevalent in head and neck cancer patients undergoing chemoradiation like me.

It is disheartening that so many years after its commercial introduction, no physician I spoke with had heard of Caphosol. After a fair amount of nagging and discussion, I was finally able to secure a prescription this week and locate a pharmacy that carried the product in advance of starting treatment this Monday (special shout out to my wife, former colleague June, and her colleague Ken for their assistance in this regard!). This is important, as one the key clinical studies supporting Caphosol’s efficacy incorporated the product at the start of therapy.  In other words, Caphosol was used before the incidence of oral mucositis or xerostomia – as a preventative therapy. The trial demonstrated that Caphosol was able to reduce the severity of oral mucositis, decrease pain and associated use of opioid analgesics, and reduce the days of neutropenia (abnormally low concentration of white blood cells in the blood) – see journal abstract from the study.

To be perfectly clear – I have absolutely no financial interest in Caphosol. However, I am a believer in the product and did extensive due diligence as part of the licensing process. As a result, I hope that this blog post can help other patients at risk for oral mucositis and/or xerostomia learn about Caphosol. While there are other agents used in the treatment of oral mucositis and xerostomia, Caphosol is unique in that the product’s efficacy was demonstrated in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical study. Perhaps the most significant distinguishing feature of Caphosol is the high concentrations of calcium and phosphate ions. Why is this important? Calcium ions play a crucial role in several aspects of the inflammatory process, the blood clotting cascade, and tissue repair, and phosphate ions may be a valuable supplemental source of phosphates for damaged mucosal surfaces. No other product on the U.S. market is formulated this way or has the proven clinical benefit that Caphosol does.