Empowering patients to make the best treatment decisions is a crucial part of cancer care and recent developments are aiming to do just that.
Prasanth Reddy, Senior Vice President, Global Enterprise Head of Oncology at Labcorp, recently sat down with SurvivorNet to discuss how diagnostic tests, such as genetic sequencing and molecular profiling, are becoming a critical part of making treatment decisions.
Read MoreThe next step, Reddy said, is to look into what treatments may work better for a person’s specific type of cancer.
“Now I know what’s driving your cancer, can I do anything about it?” he explained. “What’s so incredibly exciting now is we can.”
Why is precision medicine so promising?
You may have heard the term “precision medicine” or “targeted therapy” before. These refer to treatments that target specific types of cancer cells. This is different from chemotherapy, which can kill cancer cells but may also kill healthy cells in the process.
“We have a tremendous pipeline of therapeutic options, treatment options both standard of care and in clinical trials across targeted therapies, immunotherapies that can help the immune system correct itself when there’s an error that might be driving an unfair advantage for the cancer to grow, and then also, cell and gene therapies,” Reddy said.
One of the major advances in cancer care in recent years is something called immunotherapy. This treatment works by helping the body’s immune system to recognize and help get rid of cancer cells.
For example, if someone has lung cancer with high levels of a protein known as PD-L1 on the cancer cells, doctors may be able to use a type of immunotherapy that specifically targets this protein.
This is why running the diagnostic tests Reddy discussed and tailoring treatment accordingly, if possible, is critical to today’s cancer care.
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