Endometrial Cancer | What Is Personalized Medicine?
What are the common treatment approaches for endometrial cancer? Dr. Hinchcliff explains that options typically include surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, or a combination.
Dr. Emily Hinchcliff is a Gynecologic Oncologist at Northwestern Medicine. Learn more about Dr. Hinchcliff.
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
How would you define personalized medicine?
Dr. Emily Hinchcliff:
So, personalized medicine I think is a big umbrella term that is sort of a buzzword in cancer right now – in a good way – but I think that it is important to understand how it affects each different cancer type. So, personalized medicine, what we mean as physicians when we say that is we are trying to better tailor treatments to the individual patient and the individual cancer.
So, whether that is the cancer subtype, treating endometrial cancer with endometrial-cancer-specific drugs rather than drugs that have been used to treat ovarian cancer, and kidney cancer, and prostate cancer, so, using drugs that are potentially really good for your tumor type, but also using medicines that might best treat your individual tumor based on the genetics and the molecular features inside your tumor.
One of the ways that I’ll explain it to patients is that your tumor is sort of like base camp, and it depends on certain supply chains for oxygen and nutrients to grow, and some supply chains are common to all cancer types, so if we block that supply chain, that drug might work on any different kind of cancer. But some supply chains are really specific to a particular patient and a particular tumor, and so, if we have a drug that blocks that supply chain, it might work in that particular patient, but might not work in a patient that has a very, very similar cancer type, and that’s really where personalized medicine can be a huge win. It allows us to say, “This drug would work really well for you when it might not work really well for the patient next door.”
Katherine Banwell:
Yeah. So, I think what used to happen is everyone with a specific cancer was painted with a broad brush.
Dr. Emily Hinchcliff:
Correct.
Katherine Banwell:
And now, we’re able to hone in on what might work for one person.
Dr. Emily Hinchcliff:
Yeah. I think that certainly, those broad brushes, they worked for a reason, and they still are in our arsenal and our toolbox, and so, it doesn’t mean those brushes are bad, but it does mean that now, hopefully, we can paint a little bit more within the lines. We can be a little bit more nuanced with our approach.
