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Key considerations for cancer pharmacotherapy 1

Part 1 of 2
Published on May 29, 2017   42 min

A selection of talks on Oncology

0:00
Hello, my name is Chris Walko and I am a personalized medicine specialist at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida in the United States. And today we're going to be discussing the treatment paradigms used to treat cancer and I'm going to aim to provide an overview of key considerations for cancer pharmacotherapies. I've worked in the oncology realm for more than 10 years as a pharmacist and a clinical pharmacist and an educator and now my role is actually in chairing a Molecular Tumor Board and helping to use cancer genetics to personalize therapy in direct treatment.
0:38
So I'm really excited to see how we translate all of what we've learned over the years and throughout this lecture we're going to talk a little bit about the history of how we've treated cancer and ultimately end up with kind of where we are today with the targeted therapies intermixed with the cytotoxic therapies and the immunotherapies. So we will review this different treatment modalities used to treat cancer in this section including both local therapy, so radiation and surgery as well as systemic therapies. And we will also begin to delve into the newer targeted therapies and the immunotherapies as I said. This lecture is meant to provide an overview that will be further translated into specific malignancies in the subsequent learning module.
1:23
Initial cancer workup of solid tumors includes imaging that will help with the staging of cancer, ascertain if it is localized or if it is metastatic and whether it has spread to distant organs. Hematologic tumors are staged differently given that it's the neoplastic cells that are in the blood and the lymph nodes and bone marrow biopsy is typically used to provide a diagnosis in these situations. The specific pathologic diagnosis and extent of the disease will help to frame our treatment goals. The goal of localized cancer therapy is typically to cure whereas cancers that have spread to different organs may not be curable. So treatment aims are to control disease growth and symptoms while also maximizing quality of life. Since this module is an overview, generalities are going to be made but there are always exceptions. Some cancers are still curable even when metastatic. Testicular cancer is a great example of this if you remember the story of Lance Armstrong who did have testicular cancer that had gone to multiple areas of his body including his brain. It's a very responsive cancer to chemotherapy and so, therefore, it can be cured, so there are exceptions, but we're going to be talking in general and then the different disease modules after this will go into more specific details.
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Key considerations for cancer pharmacotherapy 1

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