According to Ryan Fields, MD, associate professor of surgery at Washington University School of Medicine, there has been a revolution over the last several years in the way we treat cancer.
As a surgical oncologist at Siteman Cancer Center, Dr. Fields specializes in pancreatic, liver, bile duct, stomach and intestinal cancers, along with soft tissue carcinoma, sarcoma, melanoma and other skin cancers.
He often treats patients who are a high risk for recurrence, and his research focuses on using novel treatments to improve patient survival rates. He studies the biology of cancer metastasis to understand why some cancers spread and some don’t.
In this presentation, Dr. Fields discusses how the treatment of cancer has evolved over the last ten years, and uses melanoma to illustrate how a greater understanding of the human genome and the immune system’s role in cancer ushered in a new era of targeted, personalized cancer treatment.