Dr. William Tap, chief of the Sarcoma Medical Oncology Service explains how research is helping us devise new drug treatments that target genetic abnormalities in sarcoma.
Video Transcript
To me it all starts in the clinic and it really begins to understand the diseases that we’re treating and what our patients go through.
We need to have a better understanding of what is causing their tumors, and in doing so, it can help us devise treatments that can actually target those abnormalities. And the goal is to switch this from a disease where we hope to contain or control to one which we can actually cure. And that’s really important. And we work here in a sarcoma lab of drug development where we create sarcoma models which are basically what we believe are representations of the disease our patients are faced with.
We work very hard in applying new drugs, non-chemotherapy drugs to really see if we can kill the sarcoma in those models. And in so doing we also really try to understand what is happening in those sarcoma models on a genetic level with the thought again if we can understand what’s wrong in a tumor we can actually begin to target that.
