Hello and thank you for your post,

I am sorry to hear about your dad's situation, and I can appreciate that you want to know more about what treatments might be available to him.

While we cannot give you a medical opinion on how he should be treated the oncologist will talk about what treatment will be available to him. Therefore,  you might find it helpful to look at the information we have for advanced bowel cancer and how it can be treated, it might help when discussing what is available for your dad. You can see it on our website here.

You ask about private treatment so do ask the oncologist about this as they may be able to say if this would be a worthwhile thing to do. However, going down the private route does not always offer more treatment options but do ask.

We usually suggest that if people are interested in trials they discuss this with their specialist as they are often aware of trials that are going on. We have information about taking part in trials and a clinical trials database on our website, which you can look at. This lists the trials that we are aware of and have permission to put on the website.

Although our contact details are included on the website, we are not directly involved in running these trials or recruiting patients onto a clinical trial. If you and your dad see a trial on our database then he will need to discuss it with his own doctor or cancer specialist.

All trials have very strict entry requirements. So he must match these to be able to take part. If it looks like an appropriate trial, his doctor can then send a referral to the doctor running the trial at your nearest participating centre.

Our trials database has the details of most of the current trials that we are aware of and have also had permission to include. But, unfortunately, it isn't comprehensive as there may be trials we don't know about or haven't been allowed to include. The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) has a database on their website called Be Part of Research.  There are other trial databases, such as the ISRCTN (International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number) registry and a US trials database called ClinicalTrials.gov, which lets you search by country,  but both of these feed into Be Part of Research.

I hope that this reply is helpful. Do contact us again if we can offer you any further information or support. You may find it helpful to talk things through with one of the nurses on our telephone service. The number to ring is freephone 0808 800 4040 and the lines are open from 9am till 5pm Monday to Friday.

Take care,

Caroline