Desperately Fighting Cancer

(CBS)  60 Minutes cameras follow three people in their desperate quests to beat the deadliest form of cancer with the help of Duke University oncologist Dr. Henry Friedman.

All three were diagnosed with brain tumors that their doctors told them would kill them within months and all three sought the new but unproven treatments offered by Dr. Friedman. Ed Bradley's special double-length report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, April 7, at 7 p.m.ET/PT

Bradley began following Taylor Black of Stuart, Fla., David Bailey of Stafford, Va., and John Ormond of New York City more than a year ago as they began treatment by Friedman. Their regimine includws monoclonal antibody therapy – an experimental treatment – in hopes of beating the terrible odds posed by brain cancer. Almost everyone diagnosed with the worst kind of malignant brain tumor dies within a year. Monoclonal antibody therapy works much like a "smart bomb," delivering an anti-cancer drug right to the growth cells of a tumor to kill its progress.

Friedman believes treatment must begin with hope. "We give them the motto that we stand by, which is 'At Duke, there is hope,'" he says. "You can see almost a swelling within as the fight in them begins to resume because they have been told before that it's absolutely, unequivocally hopeless and without hope, it just ends before it begins," the doctor tells Bradley.

Friedman works with a team of 200 doctors, researchers and scientists at the Duke University Brain Tumor Center who are developing new cancer drugs. Also, Friedman sometimes uses drugs, approved by the FDA for other cancers, such as colon cancer, in treating some of his 2,000 brain tumor patients before there has been a Phase III trial of these FDA-approved drugs in brain tumor patients.

Bypassing what's called Phase III clinical trials, in which one group of patients gets the drug approved for colon cancer as well as standard therapy and the other is treated with standard therapy alone, has attracted criticism from his colleagues. But Friedman is undeterred, believing the years it takes to test those drugs in brain cancer patients costs too many lives.

"[Phase III clinical trials] make the assumption that until you have a strong set of data that something increases survival, you can't use that intervention," he tells Bradley. "That's all well and good, unless you're a patient in the next five years while you're waiting for these trials to be done. What are they going to be offered?" says Friedman.