What new treatment options are emerging for ovarian cancer? Expert Dr. Kevin Elias shares the latest advances in ovarian cancer care, explaining how innovative therapies and ongoing clinical trials offer access to cutting-edge approaches while helping expanding future treatment options for patients.
Dr. Kevin Elias is a gynecologic oncologist and serves as the Lilli and Seth Harris Endowed Chair for Ovarian Cancer Research at the Cleveland Clinic, where he holds academic appointments in Gynecologic Oncology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Biomedical Engineering. Learn more about Dr. Elias.
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Transcript
Katherine Banwell:
Are there other emerging approaches that patients should know about?
Dr. Kevin Elias:
I think important approaches for patients to know about are there are new medications which are helping us to guide interoperative decision-making. So, there’s a medication called pafolacianine (CYTALUX), which is an FDA-approved medication, which can help us to identify small tumors at the time of surgery that might not be visible to the naked eye. So, the idea there being that we know it’s important to remove all sites of disease at the time of initial surgery.
This is a medication which would be administered prior to going into the operating room, which once the surgeon feels like they’ve removed all sites of disease, they would use a special camera to try to visualize small sites of disease that maybe they didn’t appreciate the first time and then remove those during the surgery. There are some other similar investigational agents that are also under development. So, that would be another question to ask about, if a patient feels like their surgeon is a candidate for that.
As far as other novel therapies, most of them really do fall under these kinds of novel targeted therapies. What’s quite different now are the combinations of therapies. So, we’re really doing fewer and fewer studies of a single medication. It’s typically two or three medications given in combination with each other. And so, I think it’s important that patients always ask, regardless of where they are in their treatment, about whether or not they’re a candidate for a clinical trial, because we are finding more and more medications for ovarian cancer. And really, it’s a matter of sequencing. And so, at every given opportunity to understand if someone’s a candidate for something new that might be in addition to standard therapy.
Katherine Banwell:
You have been talking about clinical trials. Why should patients consider participating in a trial? What are the benefits for them?
Dr. Kevin Elias:
So, we’re usually trying to ask one of three questions with a clinical trial. The first question is whether a potentially new medication is effective for ovarian cancer.
And oftentimes for patients who have maybe been through several different lines of therapy, we know that patients who have gone through many lines of chemotherapy are less likely to have a good response to the next line of chemotherapy. And so, it’s a good opportunity to see if a new medication might work better for them. The second type of trial we look at is a superiority trial. We have medications that we’ve shown to be effective for ovarian cancer, and they might be better than what the patient would otherwise be getting.
And the third are trials where we’re looking at the toxicity of a drug. And I think it’s important to ask that, is the amount of medicine that I’m getting or the duration of therapy that’s being recommended to me, are we sure that that’s going to be the dose that’s going to be not only the most effective for me, but also the easiest for me to tolerate? Are there studies out there that might be looking at deescalation? And increasingly, we’re looking at whether shorter courses of therapy might be equally effective as longer courses of therapy.