Systemic therapies are medicine which can be taken orally or by IV to deal with cancer. Types of systemic therapies for breast cancer embody chemotherapy, hormone therapy, immunotherapy and focused drug remedy. Which remedy is used is dependent upon which sort of breast cancer is being handled.
“The goal of systemic therapy is simply to either inhibit the growth of cancer cells or to kill them and to eradicate them from the body,” says Dr. Matthew Goetz, a medical oncologist at Mayo Clinic. Dr. Goetz can be co-leader of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center Women’s Cancer Program.
“If you can imagine a patient who is diagnosed with breast cancer, and those cancer cells have spread to other parts of the body, such as the liver, or the bone or the lung, we refer to this as stage 4 breast cancer,” says Dr. Goetz. “For those patients, systemic therapy really is the predominant therapy that we would use to slow down, eradicate and eliminate those cancer cells.”
While sufferers have many systemic remedy choices, Mayo Clinic analysis seeks to enhance on these remedies and develop new medicine to deal with and forestall cancer.
“We’re one of six centers in the country that has a specialized program of research excellence, which means that we have a large group of individuals doing research in the area of drug development,” explains Dr. Goetz. “For example, we have a group that’s developing new vaccines to actually prevent breast cancer. We’re excited to see the results of that study.”
On the Mayo Clinic Q&A podcast, Dr. Goetz discusses advances in utilizing systemic therapies to deal with breast cancer.
Watch: Dr. Matthew Goetz discuss systemic treatments for breast cancer.
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