Understanding New Targeted Therapies for Prostate Cancer
Understanding New Targeted Therapies for Prostate Cancer from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Which prostate cancer therapies are experts excited about? Dr. Heather Cheng from Seattle Cancer Care Alliance shares information about recent treatment advancements and how the therapies are utilized to help provide optimal prostate cancer care.
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Transcript:
Sherea Cary:
So, Dr. Cheng, share with us some of the new treatments that you and your colleagues are excited about?
Dr. Heather Cheng:
Thank you. So I am a medical oncologist, I specialize in genetics, most of my patients have more advanced prostate cancer, meaning they have had surgery to remove their prostate, but then their cancer continued to grow or that they have radiation and their cancer continued to grow, and we are…then looking at treatments that are medical, and by that I mean they are given through a pill, or they’re given and through an injection and they travel throughout the body and treat the cancer…wherever the cancer is.
And I think what I get very excited about is that we have new targeted therapies, and by that I mean some of my patients to have certain mutations in their cancers or DNA changes in their cancer, have access to newer treatments like a pill, for example, called in a family called PARP inhibitor, that are really especially effective against cancers that have that type of mutation. So can’t we learn about this whether it’s a good fit or whether that person’s cancer might especially be well treated by that drug by doing DNA sequencing of the cancer or DNA sequencing of that person’s DNA, inherited DNA. So, both of those can give us clues about this kind of special treatment toolboxes that I get very excited about, and so I think that’s the frontier in oncology, but also in prostate cancer as well.
