Lung Cancer Treatment Landscape Overview
Lung Cancer Treatment Landscape Overview from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Lung cancer treatments have been rapidly expanding, so what are the current options? Expert Dr. Christian Rolfo from Mount Sinai outlines the lung cancer treatment landscape and which patients might benefit most from some treatments.
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Transcript:
Dr. Nicole Rochester:
Now, let’s delve into this very important topic, how can I get the best lung cancer care? And, Dr. Rolfo, we’re going to start with an overview of the lung cancer treatment landscape. We know that this landscape is rapidly changing and keeping up with the pace of developments could be a challenge not only for doctors, but certainly for patients and family members, so I was hoping that you could give us an overview of the current lung cancer treatment landscape.
Dr. Christian Rolfo:
In the last year, lung cancer treatment was changing radically. We have actually, including some of their new concepts as precision medicine or personalized medicine, that we have actually different therapies that are specifically for some group of patients, that they have specific alterations in their tumors. And when I’m talking about alterations, I refer to mutations, genomic alterations that can be targeted nowadays with specific medications, and currently, some of them are actually, the majority of them are actually pills, for example. So it was changing radically, and we are not using it like before chemotherapy for everyone. Another area of important interest was the introduction of immunotherapy, this is also an important tool for fighting cancer. And there you have a substance that are administered generally, all of them are intravenous, and this is the principle of that is to await from your own inner system, from the patient immune system, they are the tools to fight against the cancer.
So it’s a very innovative way to approach cancer, and this is…the good thing is that these two approaches targeted therapies, immunotherapy, and also still obviously the combination with chemotherapy in some of the case with immunotherapy, we can use not only metastatic patients, so in patients who have advanced disease, but also we can use in patients who have earlier stage that they were operated, for example, and we want to prevent that this patient is not going to a further process of cancer metastases, or there are several, several innovations. Then we have innovations that are coming also from local treatments and we call local treatments the one that, for example, surgery or radiation, we have new technologies also that are arriving there, and the combination sometimes with the medical treatment or systemic treatments that are going everywhere that is the description of systemic are helping these patients to have not recurrence and improving. Actually, lung cancer survival was really improving in the last years, and we are very excited by that because, unfortunately, it’s very still an aggressive disease that we were able to change with all this armamentarium the prognosis of these patients.
