Which Endometrial Cancer Clinical Trials Are Showing Promise?
Which Endometrial Cancer Clinical Trials Are Showing Promise? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Which endometrial cancer clinical trials are showing encouraging results? Expert Dr. Emily Hinchcliff from Northwestern Medicine shares insight about novel therapies and combinations and advice for patients to be proactive in their care.
[ACT]IVATION TIP
“…understand what clinical trials are available to your physician and to you at the place that you are currently getting treated. And then also understand more globally what other clinical trials might be out there. And that’s a great question to ask your physician.”
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Transcript:
Lisa:
What ongoing clinical trials are investigating novel therapies for advanced endometrial cancer? And can you provide some insights into any promising experimental treatments that have shown encouraging results in early phase trials?
Dr. Emily Hinchcliff:
Absolutely. So I think that the use of immunotherapy in endometrial cancer has been a true game changer. It has changed the landscape of how we think about treating this disease. I think the cutting edge now is to try and understand whether immunotherapy in combination with our more traditional chemotherapy, cytotoxic chemotherapies that basically kill cells rapidly dividing as compared to immunotherapy, which helps to kill cancer cells by using the immune system. So should we be using immunotherapy in addition to, or even instead of some of those traditional chemotherapy options? There are also many, many clinical trials that are investigating novel combinations and novel targeted agents, especially for the high-risk tumor subsets.
So endometrial cancer is a broad umbrella term for many different subtypes. And the higher risk subtypes often are those that are harder to treat with our standard therapies. And so many trials are specifically trying to target better options for these patients. I think that one trial that I will just highlight in addition to some of the immunotherapies are immune therapy combinations with what are called anti-angiogenics. So drugs that try to prevent the tumor from growing its own blood supply.
And then also immunotherapy in combination with another class of drugs called PARP inhibitors which are more commonly used in ovarian cancer but which in combination with immunotherapy may be a new avenue for effective treatment.
Lisa:
And do you have an activation tip for patients for that question?
Dr. Emily Hinchcliff:
Absolutely, so I think that my activation tip for patients surrounding novel therapies in endometrial cancer is to understand what clinical trials are available to your physician and to you at the place that you are currently getting treated. And then also understand more globally what other clinical trials might be out there.
And that’s a great question to ask your physician. I think that your physician can help you to decide is a standard of care therapy the right choice for you at this point in your treatment, in your cancer journey, or are you at a point where a clinical trial may be of benefit either because of the expected efficacy of the standard of care, or because of the potential benefits of that clinical trial, or even because of the side effect profiles of either of those options.
