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Thanks for joining me to talk about the "Biology,
Diagnosis & Management of Cancer Regimen-Related Oral Mucosal Injury or Mucositis".
My name is Dr. Stephen Sonis.
I'm at Brigham and Women's Hospital and
the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Austin and
I also work with a company called Biomodels.
What I'd like to do this morning is discuss three things really.
One is the epidemiology and the background of oral mucositis,
a little bit about its history,
talk about the pathobiology, the treatment opportunities.
And, finally, how to predict the risk of mucositis
as we move ahead with precision medicine.
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Regimen-related toxicities are not new.
Sidney Farber, who is actually a pathologist at Children's Hospital in Boston,
and was devastated to see the effects of
leukemia on children towards around the end of the Second World War,
one of the first people to use chemotherapy.
And the figure on the right, Madame Curie,
at around the end of the First World War,
started to develop radiation therapy as a treatment modality for tumors.
Both noted, consistently, from the start of their work that oral mucosal toxicities
and oral mucositis mouth sores were
a significant and devastating problem for their patients.
In this slide, you can see on the left side a historic picture of one
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of the early radiation sources for the treatment of cancers. And then on the right,
obviously, a modern picture of a patient with a mask on receiving
intensity modulated radiation therapy for a tumor of the head and neck.
And despite the change in the technology,
virtually 100% of these patients develop toxicities of the oral cavity.
