Meet Dr. Harriet Kluger

Transcript

• 00:00I'm Harriet kluger. I'm a professor
• 00:02of medicine in medical oncology.
• 00:04I treat patients with Melanoma and
• 00:06renal cell carcinoma as well as
• 00:08patients with other types of skin
• 00:10cancers such as Merkel cell carcinoma.
• 00:12Towards the end of the 1990s it was
• 00:15becoming clearer and clearer that the
• 00:17big breakthroughs in understanding
• 00:19cellular biology would have major
• 00:20impact on oncology and therefore
• 00:22I decided to go into this field
• 00:24where I felt that I could actually
• 00:26make a difference in contributing
• 00:29not only to patient care but in.
• 00:31To moving the field forward
• 00:33by doing clinical research,
• 00:34I generally recommend that people come
• 00:36into their first visit with a family
• 00:39member or a caregiver simply because
• 00:41the first visit is very overwhelming.
• 00:43We give people a lot of information and
• 00:46I think it's hard to retain all of it.
• 00:49So second set of ears is always beneficial.
• 00:52When I started taking care
• 00:53of patients with cancer,
• 00:55we pretty much only had chemotherapy
• 00:57as the molecular abnormalities
• 00:58within the cancer cells became
• 01:00better and better understood.
• 01:01We were able to develop drugs that target
• 01:04those political molecular abnormalities.
• 01:06So, in Melanoma,
• 01:07the molecular lesions are mutations in a gene
• 01:09called byref primarily and in kidney cancer.
• 01:12We we have developed a whole slew of
• 01:14drugs that target the blood cell for the
• 01:17blood vessel formation within the tumor.
• 01:19So essentially,
• 01:20when we inhibit that,
• 01:22we starve the tumor a little
• 01:24bit of its nutrients,
• 01:25and that's very effective in kidney cancer.
• 01:27The other major approach,
• 01:29and that's where most of the
• 01:31breakthroughs have actually occurred.
• 01:33Is in immunotherapy for cancer,
• 01:34so these cells sit within
• 01:36a tumor microenvironment.
• 01:37They're not just sitting there by themselves,
• 01:40and if we can educate the immune system
• 01:42to recognize the cancer's foreign
• 01:44and then activate it a little bit
• 01:46further to attack those cancer cells,
• 01:49we can then essentially get rid of the
• 01:51cancer using our own bodies immune
• 01:53system as the ammunition to do so.
• 01:56We have two fantastic teams that
• 01:58we work with,
• 01:59one for skin cancer and one
• 02:01for kidney cancer.
• 02:02We're fortunate to have dedicated surgeons.
• 02:04Who understand the biology of the disease.
• 02:07They understand the drugs
• 02:08that they use that we use.
• 02:11They meet with us on a weekly basis
• 02:13and are able to tailor specific
• 02:16treatment plans for individual patients.