Empowered Patient Podcast Approved Immunotherapy for Endometrial Cancer with Dr. Matthew Powell Washington University
Dr. Matthew Powell, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and Chief of the Gynecological Oncology Division at Washington University. He was also a clinical investigator in the pivotal trial leading to the approval of Jemperli, a treatment for endometrial cancer. This is an immunotherapy drug that works well for certain types of endometrial cancer and is now used in more than ten different cancers, decreasing the chance of the cancer progressing.
Matthew explains, "Some syndromes certainly can cause an increased risk of endometrial cancer. One was named after Dr. Henry Lynch, who first described it called Lynch syndrome, also known as hereditary non-polyposis colorectal cancer syndrome because the patients are not only at risk for endometrial cancer, but they're also at risk for colon cancer. So, we see a lot of families where there's both uterine and colon cancer in the family, and that's one where that genetic risk is there."
"When it came to therapies for patients who had disease that had spread, we, over the last 70 years, have been using radiation, which doesn't work very well. It treats the areas that we treat well, but we can't treat the whole body with radiation. So that's where chemotherapy came in. Chemotherapy has been a fairly standard therapy now for over 20 years. Still, we have not made many improvements over our standard treatment of what’s called carboplatin and paclitaxel, which, again, has been around since 1995. Over the last several decades, it’s become our standard treatment for this."
#EndometrialCancer #GSK #Jemperli #Immunotherapy #GynOnc