During her visit, Carla Cabral, 49, will take a blood test and speak to an oncologist.

It's been seven years that the slender quadra, educator for children, comes here regularly.

Carla is one of the 500 people followed in all each year by the department of early clinical trials - also called "D3i" - of Curie, one of the leading centers against cancer in France.

A stone's throw from the research laboratories, in a part of the hospital, patients come for a few hours, sometimes a day, to receive their experimental treatments.

A hundred of these treatments are currently being tested here, and administered in the form of tablets, intravenously or sometimes directly into the tumour.

"I still don't know if I'm in the placebo group or not," smiles Carla.

But she is convinced that she received the medicine.

When her so-called “triple negative” breast cancer, an ultra-aggressive cancer, was diagnosed in 2009, the future looked rather bleak.

Chemotherapy, preventive surgery, nothing helps.

The young woman had two relapses, until in 2015, she was offered to join a clinical trial program.

"Now I have my life back, it has become a chronic disease," she says.

Additional "cartridges"

On the pharmaceutical laboratory promoter of its treatment, Professor Christophe Le Tourneau, who directs the "D3i", will not say a word.

Except that the mode of operation of the drug tested has demonstrated its effectiveness.

This is a so-called targeted therapy, targeting a specific genetic mutation.

Among the game-changing treatments, Curie is also experimenting with immunotherapy.

This new type of therapy, born about ten years ago, consists of acting on the patient's immune system, rather than on the cancerous cell itself, to bring the immune defenses to fight against tumours.

Professor Christophe Le Tourneau, head of the Institut Curie's "D3i" early clinical trials department, speaks with a nurse in charge of the service, on June 14, 2022 in Paris Thomas SAMSON AFP

"Immunotherapy has been a revolution", emphasizes Professor Le Tourneau.

"It is estimated that it increases the total cure rate of cancer by 5%. This concerns small groups often having a particular mutation, but for whom the disease was previously incurable".

Strongly solicited by pharmaceutical groups who must test their treatments in order to be able to market them, the D3i team decides whether or not to integrate a clinical trial "depending on the interests of the patients above all, but also on the scientific interest “, adds the oncologist.

In one of the service cubicles, behind a curtain, Pierre watches TV to pass the time, connected to an infusion device.

The 59-year-old from the Jura suffers from thymus cancer, an aggressive tumour, for which he is following an immunotherapy protocol.

"In Besançon, I was just offered to do chemotherapy again. I said yes immediately to Curie's trial," he says, as the infusion machine starts to beep.

A patient from the Institut Curie receives an experimental treatment at the "D3i" early clinical trials department, on June 14, 2022 in Paris Thomas SAMSON AFP

Not all treatments tested here work.

There is a significant attrition rate, since only between 10 and 30% of the molecules tested will materialize through a marketed treatment, recalls Christophe Le Tourneau.

Effective or not, clinical trials are essential to validate the treatments of tomorrow, notes however the oncologist.

"Most patients also want to help by participating in research. These trials give them access to drugs that are not yet marketed in France, or to the drugs of tomorrow: these are additional cartridges against their cancer", adds he again.

Carla, she explains that she hardly hesitated.

There was indeed a little concern at the beginning, she says, but "everything was explained to me very well. And I knew that I could get out of the protocol. At the beginning, it was especially important to be cured of the disease. Now, over time, I tell myself that I am also participating in research, I feel useful", she underlines.

Today, the elegant forty-year-old has finished her visit, an appointment is made six weeks later.

In her purse, the experimental pills are stored, as if nothing had happened.

© 2022 AFP