Evolution of oncology opens the way for a cancer revolution.

By Eric Nadler, MD

Almost every morning, I pick up the newspaper and read about some new promising cancer treatment or how researchers have discovered a new cellular pathway important in cancer development. I am not the only person paying attention to these articles because my patients usually mention the same articles to me. Before I even have a chance to ask how their week was, they always ask the same question: “Does this new finding pertain to my cancer?” Although seemingly a straightforward question, I always have to pause before I reply because the answer takes some explaining.

I have been around cancer and cancer discoveries my entire life. As a young boy not much older than 10, I accompanied my father Lee Nadler, MD, a research oncologist, on his visits to the bone marrow wards. I would stand on my tiptoes and smile through a small window into a white, sterile room. My father’s patients would tell him that a smile and a kind word from a child had a therapeutic effect.

Yet it was not until I was much older that I realized the importance of these interactions. My father—one of the early researchers to perform transplants on patients with relapsed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma—had patients with bad prognoses. They had been told they had only a few months to live and that no patient had ever lived more than seven years with these particular cancers.

Two weeks ago, I spent time with some of these patients—people who since my childhood have become family friends after a transplant saved their life. As I was hugging these old friends, I remembered 20 years ago when they had been told they had months to live.

The past two decades have been an exciting time in the field of cancer research and discovery. As physicians, we have to re-learn the lessons we were taught as new discoveries surface monthly. In medicine, we speak of the natural history of diseases. Well, the natural history of most cancers has become a moving target over the past five years and even those on the cutting edge do not know what the future will bring.

One of the first patients I ever treated had colon cancer that had metastasized to his liver and lung. When I first saw him in 2002, there were two lines of approved treatment in advanced colon cancer. He is now receiving his fourth approved regimen and still gardens six days a week.

This issue of CURE looks at many of these new advances in cancer treatment—and those only months or years away. We can’t predict the future, but as a young oncologist, I think it looks very promising for patients—a vision we are relaying to you in this special issue. You will read about tremendous advances in diagnostic technologies and molecular analyses that enable us to “target” our treatments to specific features of a given tumor. Other stories look at the latest treatment approaches for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, advocating for legislative change and the way the Internet has made traveling the cancer journey easier.

As cancer developments occur at an ever-increasing pace, we all benefit from the increased knowledge. What is thought of as a treatment for breast cancer today may become a treatment for pancreatic cancer tomorrow. So when a patient asks, “Does it apply to me?” the answer is: “It applies to all of us.”