Schroeder on the Evolving Ovarian Cancer Treatment Landscape

Eric Schroeder, MD, gynecologic oncologist at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute, discusses how treatments for patients with ovarian cancer have evolved in recent years.

Historically, chemotherapy regimens employed for the treatment of ovarian cancer frequently caused damage to healthy cells alongside cancerous ones. This resulted in notable adverse effects among patients. Now, advancements in precision chemotherapies and targeted therapies have ushered in a more discerning strategy, specifically targeting cancer cells.

Here, Schroeder expresses enthusiasm about recent advancements in ovarian cancer treatment and highlights the emergence of newer chemotherapies, targeted therapies, and biological agents, which enable a more selective targeting of cancer cells, marking an exciting development in the field.

Transcription:

0:09 | Recent years have been a little bit exciting for ovarian cancer. There has been the introduction of some new kinds of targeted therapies. For a long time, we used chemotherapies that are used in other disease sites as well, and they typically treat all the cells of the body. That is where you get a lot of the [adverse] effects from. With more recent chemotherapies and more targeted therapies and biologic agents, we have been able to affect the cancer cells more preferentially than the normal host cells, so that has been exciting.

0:49 | The introduction of immunotherapy has been exciting. It has not panned out terribly well in ovarian cancer, not as well as in some of the other cancers, but still for some women, it does work. It has been a nice addition. I think more than anything is kind of a renewed interest and focus in research [with the] acceptance that we are nowhere near where we want to be. There are more products coming out and there have been some regulatory changes which have allowed some products to come to market faster than then previously.