Next Steps to Further Understand Uterine Sarcoma

Matthew A. Ingham, MD, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, discusses the key takeaways from an article he co-authored regarding novel therapeutics in uterine sarcoma.

According to Ingham, there is an urgent unmet need to translate molecular findings into clinical trials of novel agents for patients with sarcomas, specifically uterine sarcoma. He notes that further advances in the space will rely on collaborations at the academic level, as well as more clinical trials evaluating patients with uterine sarcoma.

Transcription:

0:08 | What we all want to try to do in the world of sarcoma, because it's such a rare disease [and] there are some challenges, is to understand it and develop clinical trials. I think that what the article tries to take home is if we can understand the biology of the disease, what the genomic alterations, the different mutations, and molecular abnormalities are and how we can take advantage of those vulnerabilities is the key to advancing the treatment for all of these.

0:31 | I mentioned a little bit about uterine leiomyosarcoma. It seems like there are homologous recombination and DNA damaging deficiencies that we can target therapeutically with hopefully more effective and less toxic drugs. But I just wanted to make the point that even in these less common ones, like endometrial stromal sarcoma, for example, there was some interesting work that was done that shows that the fusion protein that's very characteristic of this, which is this YWHAE fusion, other been some papers that have identified that it up regulates what's called cyclin D1, but it sort of alters certain pathways that we do have drugs for that we've introduced and how we test these patients.

1:12 | That may be the next step in how we understand a little bit more about what the fusions or the mutations do. That kind of opens the door to conducting clinical trials to test drugs that will kind of try to reverse those changes. I think that's where we're trying to go with the field.