Cancer care has evolved over the past decades and one would expect that the more the field evolves, the easier it would get to care for cancer patients. The reality is far more complex and it has become very complicated to provide cancer care. Several factors explain this complexity.
The word cancer is a broad term and doesn’t refer to a single disease. There are so many types of cancer that one would be hard-pressed to give a quick answer as to how many cancer types exist. Each cancer is different from all other cancers even if many cancer types can be placed under the same category, such as solid tumors. For example, breast cancer differs a great deal from leukemia.
To complicate things further, each cancer often has several subtypes and the way one subtype is treated could vary a great deal from the way another subtype can be treated. For example, glioblastoma, a very aggressive brain cancer, kills most patients so quickly and this compels oncology teams to throw everything they can at the disease as soon as it is detected. In contrast, another glioma called astrocytoma can be low-grade and require less aggressive treatment while the high-grade subtype of this brain cancer requires aggressive treatment.
Another factor that makes cancer care complex is the biological differences between individuals. These differences, such as a person’s genetic makeup, can impact how that person responds to certain treatments and the rate at which the cancer they have develops or progresses.
In lots of cases, a patient diagnosed with cancer may have other health conditions for which they are undergoing treatment. For example, a person with cardiovascular disease may be diagnosed with lung cancer. Treating such a cancer patient requires clinical teams to evaluate their overall state of health and how the available treatment options for the cancer they have could impact their heart health.
The drugs that the patient may be taking for the comorbidities also matter in cancer care. Teams must evaluate potential drug interactions and how any adverse events from these interactions can be prevented or managed.
Additionally, treatment options for a lot of cancers have expanded significantly. Clinical teams have to evaluate each patient and consider which treatment options would be the most suitable for a given patient. The options initially considered appropriate may need to be changed in case the cancer develops resistance to a given treatment or the patient fails to tolerate the treatment. Therapy often has to be tweaked in response to the changes noted as the patient is monitored during their treatment journey.
All in all, providing cancer care has been complex and is getting more complex as the factors above evolve. As cancer care becomes more personalized with more immunotherapies coming on the market from biotech firms like Calidi Biotherapeutics Inc. (NYSE American: CLDI), the treatment journey of one patient is going to become increasingly different from that of another patient with the same type of cancer.
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