Dr Joseph Alvarnas: Innovative Therapies Can Change Oncology Care Paradigm

Technological advances in cancer care have changed the very process of treatment, as now oncologists can gain more insight into the most effective therapy for each individual patient, according to Joseph Alvarnas, MD, of the City of Hope and editor-in-chief of Evidence-Based Oncology.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How are innovative therapies like precision medicine and immuno-oncology changing the cancer care landscape?

It’s really hard to think of oncology in the same way with the availability of this wealth of therapeutics that would have been unimaginable. And it’s not just this idea that we have new technologies. It’s the idea that the process for how we’re going to use these technologies is really based on something different than just iteratively trying something new for a patient in need.

Our old model of caring for patients involved first-line therapy and second-line therapy and third-line therapy based upon this idea that you’d have to move to something different than what you used before. These days, with immuno-oncologic drugs, what we’re able to do is actually really leverage the biology of the tumor in a way to target it most effectively: achieving better outcomes and also reducing toxicities.

On the flip side of this, there are things that we can learn by understanding a patient through next-generation sequencing and other genomic technologies that let us know that first-line and second-line and third-line for one person may be very radically different based upon their genetic makeup versus another patient with ostensibly the same diagnosis.

So I see these things as tools which are working in tandem to enhance patient care, so it’s a very new, very complex paradigm for delivering care unlike anything that we’ve had over the history of oncology.