Ailing teen helped create cancer app with valuable information for pediatric cancer patients

For families who have a child battling cancer, the situation can be overwhelming, and one Valley couple who lost their daughter to cancer is talking about an app that their daughter helped create.

"The Purple Drug Guide" is an app that makes it easier to learn about cancer-fighting drugs for children. It provides families with cutting-edge data about pediatric cancer.

The Contis and their daughter Nitalia launched the Scottsdale non-profit organization "The Purple Society", during Nitalia's brave battle with cancer.

"The Purple Society was started by our daughter," said Anthony Conti, the society's co-founder. "She was diagnosed with brain cancer at 12 years old, and she saw there was a need for resources. All these families that she met and all these children she met didn't have the resources she had, so she wound up bringing those resources to those children. So she did that while she was fighting her own battle with cancer"

The Purple Drug Guide is a free app.

"When your child is diagnosed with cancer, most people - almost everyone we deal with shuts down," said Conti. "It's very difficult to comprehend your child has cancer."

The app is an educational tool so parents, as well as older kids, can stay updated on advances in cancer-fighting drugs.

"It simplifies and makes it easy for families to find out about the drugs their children are being prescribed, cross references those drugs with other drugs, find the pricing of those drugs," said Conti.

The Purple Drug Guide includes real-time updates from government databases around the world. Since price fluctuations can be a challenge, it simplifies that process.

"It takes seconds to pull this information," said Conti. "The important part is the economics. You can actually see the price of the drug itself."

The app also includes a section for natural and experimental cancer-fighting treatments. More than 10,000 different drugs are listed in the Purple Drug Guide, and the Apple Store is expected to release an update soon.