State-of-the-Art Lung Cancer Treatments

Video Transcript

"Hi I am Doctor Kenneth Fink of a medical oncologist at Zimmer Cancer Center at New Hanover Regional Medical Center Wilmington, North Carolina. Lung cancer therapy has has come quite a long way in the in the last several years. The treatment has improved and survival is improving greatly. Some of the newer things going on include all aspects of of lung cancer therapy including the surgery of lung cancer the radiation therapy of lung cancer and the and the medical therapy of lung lung cancer. In particular the the one of the newer innovations we have had in the last ten years or so is is what we have found since most patients with lung cancer actually seventy-five percent of lung cancer patients cannot have surgery it leaves us with because their cancer is just a little bit too advanced and a surgeon cannot remove it, leaves us with the other treatments such as radiation and chemotherapy. One of the better innovations we have had in the last ten years is the combination of chemotherapy and radiation. We have found that that that works quite a bit better. There was a time when if your cancer could not if your lung cancer could not be removed you would just have radiation alone. And then some some good trials came along about fifteen years ago that tried chemotherapy before radiation and that seemed to have improved their survival by quite a few months, then some more trials came combining chemotherapy combining radiation therapy with chemotherapy and that improved survival even more. Although it is a little bit more toxic to get the chemotherapy with radiation together we found that overall patients do a lot better and get a lot longer survival. Once cancer once the lung cancer has spread beyond the lung and is now medesthetic patients are obviously very worried about their situation and whether they will whether they will they will survive and how long they will they will survive. What we have found is that some of our drugs have gotten much better in the last ten years in this regard. The the drugs in the in fact the drugs ten or fifteen years ago we were not even using drugs for that situation we would have none that were available or if they want they are to try experimental drugs, we would give them that that try. By doing experimental protocols that way we came came out with much better drugs and much better outcomes. One of the newest treatments is a drug called Bevacizumab, also called Avastin. When combined with standard chemotherapy drugs this drug has been shown to improve survival. This very interesting drug it is what we call a biological or an immunological drug it actually targets the blood vessels that that feed the cancer, and it sort of prunes the vessels down and and allows the chemotherapy drugs to get into the cancer a lot better, and it also reduces the blood flow to the cancer so it does not survive as well. So that is one of our our biggest innovation. So I would say that for lung cancer therapy we have come quite a long way we have improved survivals quite a bit with a combination of chemotherapy and radiation, we have come up with excellent new drugs including biological drugs that attack the blood vessels and and and reduce the blood flow to the cancer and improve the chemotherapy into the cancer and and this is all resulted in an improvement in survival of of lung cancer."