A new film, Surviving Terminal Cancer (www.survivingterminalcancer.com) by director/writer Dominic Hill, had its premiere at Lincoln Center February 18, 2015. Through the personal stories of Ben Williams and a remarkable wave of other long-term glioblastoma survivors following in his path, the film offers for the first time some hope for an alternative to the certain death offered by the current medical establishment for what is ordinarily considered to be an invariably fatal disease.

Focusing on a new cocktail approach of repurposing drugs and herbs to block multiple pathways of this notoriously adaptive killer, the film goes on to ask why this approach isn’t more widely tried given the universally grim outcome of standard glioblastoma treatments.

The film finds a surprising array of legal and economic culprits interfering in the common-sense advancement of readily available treatment options for this disease, supported by interviews with numerous top players in the field. A nearly unknown treatment called CUSP9, for instance, which consists of a combination of ordinary generic drugs not normally used in treating cancer and is freely available on PubMed.org, has struggled to pass through the expensive FDA gauntlet of phase 3 trials because no drug company would stand to profit from it.

The film goes on to draw comparisons with the early AIDS crisis, when a similar wall of overly stringent government requirements which were ill-matched to the fatality of the disease hampered development of promising treatment plans.

The film starkly highlights the enormous human toll resulting from the current system, and urges policy changes which could radically speed development of standard glioblastoma care, potentially reducing it to a manageable condition like HIV within a generation.

The film is freely available online at http://www.survivingterminalcancer.com/.