About 600 thousand interventions have been postponed due to the pandemic emergency, a good part of which concerns neoplasms. The Undersecretary for Health recalled this Pierpaolo Sileri speaking a Marcangolo, the updating congress on news in oncology, organized for 13 years in the Marche region, during the opening session which was also attended by the Councilor for Health of the Marche Region Filippo Saltamartini and His Excellency Mons. Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy For the life. Cancer patients themselves have suffered the serious effects of the pandemic due to the devastating impact that Sars-Cov-2 has had on them, complete with skipped screening, fear of going to hospitals and sometimes receiving treatment. “Lung cancer mortality, for example, has increased by 30 percent,” he said Renato Bisonni, UOC Director of Medical Oncology at the Murri Civil Hospital in Fermo and scientific director of the congress together with Rossana Berardi, Professor of Medical Oncology and Director of the Oncology Clinic of the Ospedali Riuniti of Ancona, explaining: “We want to understand in which direction to move both on a regional and national level, obviously from a scientific point of view but the reflection also extends to the ethical one to evaluate and define the overall priorities for taking charge “. The conference was also opened electronically to the associations of Marcangola, the network of regional oncological associations, and now it is possible to follow it on the facebook pages ‘Oncology Marche communicate cancer’.
The scientific news
“The novelties of this last year are different and very significant in the therapeutic approach. I cite, for example, the case of immunotherapy which is gaining more and more space in various oncological fields. This is the case of lung cancer for which we have had confirmation of an important survival, as shown by the Pacific study on stage three tumors or the chemo-immunotherapy studies with pembrolizumab or the studies with combinations of double immunotherapy with nivolumab and ipilimumab. in advanced disease ”, underlined Berardi. Another example: the increasingly clear evidence of the benefit of CyclineChinase inhibitors on breast cancer, capable of making the disease, even in the metastatic phase, controllable for years. A further example, the approval, for the first time – and it is a paradigm revolution in the oncology field – of two agnostic drugs, that is, not used for a specific type of tumor but to hit a target called NTRK. Patients presenting with any disease, as long as NTRK is positive, can access these drugs. “Perhaps we lose a little of sight of the primary tumor but we can count on a molecular study that allows us to open up new opportunities in all types of cancer, from the most difficult to the rarest,” Berardi says.
The profiling of tumors
Finally, in this 2021, the need for biomolecular profiling has become stronger: in order to better frame the therapeutic strategy it is essential to have not only information on the clinical conditions or on the stage of the disease, but it is necessary to be able to count on an extended profile of genetic mapping that allows us to understand if there are mutations of the targets that can be hit. “In this sense, the Molecular Tumor Board in the context of the Oncology and Research Center of the Marche CORM was decisive in our region, whose activation has allowed the evaluation of over 25 patients from all the Marche’s oncologies. With biomolecular profiling – concludes Berardi – we have managed not to move even a patient, but only the samples “.