Ingham Discusses Uterine Sarcoma Subtypes

Matthew Ingham, MD, an assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, discusses the unique biology of uterine sarcomas.

Transcript:

0:07 | With uterine sarcoma, I think we tend to think it reflects sarcoma as a whole, which means it's a rare disease, and it has many different subtypes within it. And all these subtypes of uterine sarcoma are quite different biologically and clinically. And so really, what we need to do is try to understand them individually so that we can treat them individually as well. So, when we think about uterine sarcoma, the most common subtype is leiomyosarcoma [LMS], which is a sarcoma that comes from the smooth muscle of the uterus. That accounts for the majority of uterine sarcomas, maybe about 70% to 80%. It's a difficult disease to treat even after we remove it by surgery, it has a high risk between 50 and 60% of unfortunately have coming back in the lungs or elsewhere in the body. So, it does have a high rate of metastatic relapse.

0:57 | One of the unmet needs and sarcoma researchers to develop better systemic therapies for advanced uterine LMS. Then the other types of uterine sarcoma are a little bit less common. There are high-grade and endometrial stromal sarcomas, there's a low-grade endometrial stromal sarcoma, and we have less common subtypes, which are adenosarcoma. Sometimes we'll see a type called PEComa, which arises in the uterus. Even after those, there are several ultra-rare uterine sarcomas. I think the challenge is just that it's a collection of rare diseases that are very distinct.