As Cleveland Clinic celebrated its 100th anniversary, Brian Bolwell, MD, chair of its Taussig Cancer Institute, reflected on the advancements made in cancer care over the last 10 years in a recent statement published on the health system's website.
Four notes from Dr. Bolwell:
1. Cleveland Clinic's team-based care improved cancer programming. The team-based model leverages the expertise of physicians from different specialties, nurses and other support staff, which enhances each individual cancer program.
2. Today, cancer diagnoses are almost exclusively based on genomic or immunological abnormalities — "a substantial change that has contributed to a paradigm shift in cancer therapeutics," Dr. Bolwell said in the Jan. 25 article.
3. Immunological and genomic therapies are the new standard of care for a majority of cancers. "The outcomes of immunologic therapies for diseases like melanoma and renal and lung cancers, among many others, are a springboard for more optimism about where the next ten years could take us," Dr. Bolwell wrote. A decade ago, their use was still novel and limited to a small number of cancers.
4. Survivorship is a growing area of cancer care. Advancements in therapeutics have improved cancer patients' outcomes, allowing them to "live with cancer as a chronic disease," Dr. Bolwell said. "The implications of an increasingly large number of people living with cancer are wide ranging, from the development of additional abnormalities due to the interplay between immunologic drugs and genomic abnormalities, to the unknowns of long-term use of immunologic agents."