The Good News About Cancer

Today, people are living much longer after a cancer diagnosis and treatment than in the past. In this episode, Chuck and Alicia talk with Dr. Anne Blaes, a medical oncologist and leader in cancer survivorship at the University of Minnesota, about what it means to live well with cancer. They look at how survivorship has changed over time, the importance of multidisciplinary care, and how precision medicine could help prevent long-term complications.

Today, patients often live a long time after receiving treatment for cancer. For many people, this means they are also living with the after-effects of those treatments, which can impact essential organs like the heart. Dr. Javid Moslehi, a cardiologist, specializes in treating the hearts of cancer survivors. Chuck and Alicia talk with him about the intersection of cancer and cardiology, and how interdisciplinary approaches can better serve all patients.

This summer, a new targeted treatment for pancreatic cancer was approved by the FDA. The treatment, Rasonque (daraxonrasib), is giving new hope to people with a disease that had been seen as almost untreatable. In this episode, Chuck and Alicia unpack this new development with Dr. Brian Wolpin, director of the Hale Family Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who led the drug trial.

Vaccines have long been used to treat many diseases, but cancer has not historically been one of them. At the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dr. Vinod Balachandran and others are working to change that. In this episode, Chuck talks with Dr. Balachandran about his work on a vaccine to treat pancreatic cancer.

In the past few decades, we have made huge strides when it comes to reducing mortality from lung cancer. Gone are the days when cigarettes were allowed in restaurants – improvements in prevention, screening, and treatment for lung cancer have completely changed the narrative. In this episode, Alicia and Chuck talk through the good news about lung cancer with Dr. Christine Lovly, Division Chief of Thoracic Medical Oncology at City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center.

More than a decade ago, doctors at the University of Pennsylvania treated a patient with her own T cells, which had been engineered to recognize and target the cancer cells in her body. The treatment, which is called CAR T cell immunotherapy, is now widely used for patients with leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma. Today, scientists like Saul Priceman are working to take this therapy to the next level, making it effective against as many cancer types as possible. He talked with Chuck and Alicia about what his lab is doing to improve CAR T cell immunotherapy.

New research is helping us to better understand the connections between nutrition and cancer risk. Alicia and Chuck talked with Mathilde Touvier, one of the global researchers studying this issue. She’s a nutritional epidemiologist based in France, and her lab is looking at the effects certain food additives have on our risk of developing cancer.

Huge strides have been made in diagnosing and treating childhood cancers, but most of those benefits are seen in the wealthiest countries in the world. This leaves hundreds of thousands of children in need of adequate cancer care. Dr. André Ilbawi with the World Health Organization tells us about their initiative that aims to bridge this gap, and deliver services to children in low and middle resourced countries with the goal of saving one million children by 2030.

Bladder cancer used to be a disease with very few effective treatment options. That was until two new strategies came on the scene: immunotherapies and antibody drug conjugates. These approaches have changed the way doctors treat bladder cancer, and prolonged the lives of many patients. Dr. Tom Powles, head of Barts Cancer Institute, tells Chuck and Alicia about his work on developing these treatments and where he hopes science will take us next.

Radioligand therapy is a form of precise cancer treatment that targets specific cells with a radioactive substance. It’s used to treat prostate cancer and some types of neuroendocrine cancer, delivering powerful results with minimal impact on patient quality of life. Dr. Michael Morris helped develop radioligands for prostate cancer, and he tells Chuck and Alicia about the huge promise he sees in these treatments going forward.