Colorectal Cancer Advanced Treatments and Clinical Trial Benefits
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Fola May
In this program:
What are colorectal cancer treatment advancements? Dr. Fola May from UCLA Health shares insight about new treatments under study and new methodologies in development for colorectal cancer screening.
Transcript
Broderick Rodell:
So can you speak to the benefits of clinical trials and advancing treatment for the various colorectal cancers, and are there any upcoming studies you are anticipating?
Dr. Fola May:
In the world of colorectal cancer, there are two areas where the research is kind of hot right now, and the clinical trial work is really, really very quite active. The first is actually in diagnostics in early detection, so we talked a little bit about the screening test, right now there are seven screening modalities that are suggested by the United States Preventive Task Force, they're the ones that make the recommendations about preventive care in the United States. So some of those tests include colonoscopy, which is the most common screening modality, but they're also a stool-based test that you can do in the comfort of your own home to screen for colorectal cancer, and really where the advancing technology is right now is developing tests beyond that list of seven. So there's a really fancy work that's being done to develop blood tests to early detect colorectal cancer, there's even a urine test that they're being developed to detect colorectal cancer and a pill test, this is the concept that you can have a small pill this size, and it has cameras all over it, and you can swallow it and it takes pictures all the way down, and if you have anything abnormal in your colon it would snap a picture of it, and only the individuals where they find an abnormal picture, do we need to do a colonoscopy to go in and see if there is a polyp or a cancer.
So all of these technologies are great and they're being developed, and I think it will add to the menu of options for people when you ask specifically about treatment, and there's also some clinical trials work in treatment as well, we're testing new chemotherapy drugs, some drugs that have already been used in other cancers, we're testing them in colorectal cancer, and we're looking for ways to combine drugs that we already know work against colorectal cancer to see if when they are given to a patient together, they are more effective at treating the disease and putting people into remission. The other thing that's very hot right now is targeted therapy drugs, this is the idea that we can target aspects of the cancer cells or the processes that the cancer cells need to survive to actually block down the progression of the tumors. So these are hot areas. Colon cancer is so common that there's a lot of laboratories all over the country that are focusing on improving the treatment options, and I think we're going to see even more great science in this area moving forward.
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