Cancer patients from Otago and Southland participate in trials for new drugs, not yet available to the public.

Southern Blood and Cancer clinical leader Dr Blair McLaren said up to 10 patients took part in trials at any given time.

The drugs patients receive in trials are generally expensive medications which are not yet available through the public system.

Drug companies make the drugs available free of charge for the trials, which are designed to gather more information about the drugs' effectiveness and side-effects.

Dr McLaren said only those drugs which were considered likely to improve a patient's quality of life were considered, and the treatment offered had to be at least as good as what was already available.

No pressure was put on patients to participate, but many were keen to take part.

Dr McLaren said although the patients naturally wanted to see drugs which helped them, they were also altruistic and could see the bigger picture of advancing knowledge about new drugs.

Generally, only a few patients from Otago or Southland take part in trials.

Some took part in the original Herceptin trials for patients with Her2 positive breast cancer.

That trial compared patients who took Herceptin for a year with chemotherapy and compared it with those who had conventional chemotherapy.

More recently, another expensive drug for the same type of cancer, Lapatinib, was tested, with the trial finishing earlier this year.

The drug has a gene receptor blocking agent that can slow down cancer growth.

Unlike Herceptin it is taken orally.

Dr McLaren said several patients responded to the treatment with their cancers getting smaller, but several patients did not respond.

It was a drug which was still under discussion and, like Herceptin, it was very expensive.

Other drugs, for ovarian and bowel cancer, are also being tested by a small number of patients.

Dr McLaren said it was a fascinating time to be an oncologist.

When he first trained in the discipline in the 1990s cancer treatments were quite limited, but there had been dramatic advances since then.

Those participating in some of the trials in the south had played a part in those advances.

Patients with incurable cancers were not only often living years longer, but they were living better quality lives then they would have 10 or 15 years ago, he said.