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Cancer Current Topics in Cancer

Molecular Targeted Therapy: A New Way of Treating Cancer


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Summary & Participants

Molecular targeted therapies may become a revolutionary change in the treatment of cancer. Listen as experts describe how these drugs are being used today and what may lie ahead.

Medically Reviewed On: July 14, 2008

Webcast Transcript


PAUL BUNN, MD: The list of cancers treated with molecularly targeted drugs is long and growing, all the way from leukemia to solid tumors, such as breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, and every day literally we're adding to the list of cancers that are going to be treated with molecularly targeted drugs.

ANNOUNCER: Sometimes targeted therapies are used alone. More commonly, they're used in combination with traditional chemotherapy.

PAUL BUNN, MD: Tarceva combined with gemcitabine is better than either alone in pancreas cancer. Herceptin combined with chemotherapy is better than chemotherapy alone for HER-2 positive breast cancer. All the angiogenesis agents have been shown to be better in combination with chemotherapy than by themselves, so that is most often true, but not always.

ANNOUNCER: In some cancers, such as several types of lymphoma, targeted therapy can increase the likelihood of a cure. In other cases, the newer drugs delay the progression of a fatal disease. As doctors and researchers continue to learn more about how cancer develops, they say more and better targeted drugs will become available. They payoff in improved treatment is likely to be significant.

PAUL BUNN, MD: So the promises of molecular targeted therapy and personalized medicine using specific therapies for a specific patient's tumor, are that we will cure many more patients with early stage disease and that patients that have advanced disease that can't be cured will have a product life.

DAVID GARFIELD, MD: In all the years I've been in oncology, these past few years have been the most exciting. We were stuck with chemotherapy for years. The progress was slow and arduous. But now we're finding that these molecular targeted therapies work in a dramatic fashion, very quickly. For reasons that we understand, whereas we didn't understand the chemotherapy before, we're able to combine molecular targeted therapies and get a better response and so these are very, very fine times for us. The fruits of our labors over the last many decades are finally coming to fruition.

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