HJBR Jan/Feb 2022

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  JAN / FEB 2022 23 MBP continued... going to encourage it, because they know that the best peace of mind for a patient to go into treatment is to feel like they’ve got all their bases covered. The last thing: it’s hard to advocate for your patient if you think they have anxiety about the direction they’re going in. So, we think it’s an important and vital part of that phase that we were talking about earlier about learning about your cancer diagnosis and then starting treatment — that thought about second opinion or getting treated elsewhere is a vital part of the person reach- ing the right peace of mind to know that they’re in the right place at the right time for their cancer care. So, we embrace it. Editor: Do you think most cancers will be eradicated in our lifetime? Stevens: MDAnderson’s mission is to eradi- cate cancer. I don’t think we eradicate the disease, because it’s so biologically compli- cated. In our lifetimes, I think we’ll be able to figure out some genetic predispositions to cancer and turn them off before they ever manifest into a malignancy. Let’s say there’s a patient that if they’re certain that that patient’s going to get cancer X, and they figured out how to turn off the receptors to the genes that cause cancer X, then that patient never gets cancer X. I think you’ll see a sleeve of that in our lifetimes. I think what we’ll see a lot more of is that we’ll be able to detect cancers earlier, and that we’ll be able to know more at the molecular level about why that cancer is going to spread or not spread. I think we’ll be able to treat people less aggressively based on molecular information, because sometimes in the absence of that molecu- lar information, right now, we treat people just because they don’t know. I think you’ll be able to see the treatments that people receive much more refined in our lifetimes. I also think you’ll see areas where we’ll be able to be much more aggressive with targeted therapies that are solely based on an individual’s genetic makeup. Imagine, 10 years from now, a patient presents with a breast cancer, and they’ll know exactly what drug combination and combination of radi- ation therapy or surgery to deploy for that patient that is focused exclusively on the genetic profile of that particular patient’s disease. So, I think you’ll continue to see survival rates increase. There are 21 million cancer survivors today compared to around 9 million in 1971. I think 10 years from now, that 21 million will be 30million, and it’ll just continue to evolve from there. But, eradicating it as we know it, that would be so awesome. I think we’re going to eradicate it from killing as many people as it does. 650,000 or so people die a year of cancer, so if we could get people to stop smoking, we could eradicate 30% to 40% of cancer death. That’s a long-winded answer to, we’re going to make a ton of progress, and a lot of people are going to have really awesome outcomes from cancer diagnosis, and we’ll be able to prevent more cancer. Colonoscopy prevents cancer, right? So, you go in there and you have a little small polyp, it’s precancerous, it gets sniffed off. You just prevented a cancer. I believe we’ll have more tools along those lines in the future as well, where we can catch cancer before it turns into cancer. Like low-dose CT scans right now — If you were a smoker in the past, but you quit, you can get a simple low dose CT scan, and it will reveal if there’s some change in the thoracic cavity and lungs that could be precancerous. And, if they are, you can get in there and take care of them. So, I think we’ll see more and more ways to prevent cancer from ever manifesting. And then, once it does, we’ll be earlier and more aggressive in identifying why that cancer’s a risk and how to treat it. Editor: It’d be exciting to see. Stevens: Yep, it’s all there. It’s coming, and the second something will help a patient, we want to make it available in Louisiana. We’ve got this exciting MRI linear accelera- tor that we’re going to bring online in 2022. I don’t know much about physics, but the idea is of anMRI, which is a magnet coexist- ing in the same room, in the same machine with a linear accelerator that generates 15 million electron volts. It’s mind-blowing that the two things can even exist in the same building, let alone in the same room. This device — which, I think, there are maybe 8 to 12 of them in the United States right now, most of them are in large academic institu- tions — will allow us, in real-time, to see the cancer with the MRI and treat the disease with a linear accelerator at the same time. That’s going to open the doorway for us to treat soft tissues and areas in the anatomy where targets move around, and by target, I mean tumor. If you think about using radia- tion, you point it, you want to hit the target, right? But, if the target’s moving, you have to either decide, well, it’s too risky, we can’t use radiation; or you have to use a larger field where you make sure you hit the target, but you hit the healthy tissue as well. This MRI-LINAC — which was made pos- sible by Art Favre and his family and many other donors joining him in making a really generous donation — we hope, is operational in July or August of 2022. It’s going to let us treat people that we previously did not have an option to use radiation for, because either you couldn’t see the target, or it moved around too much. That’s an example of these tools that are going to continue to evolve and become available. Without our medical physics team and all these sophisticated radiation oncol- ogists we have and people willing to drive and learn how to use that technique, that particular device would not be available in typical communities the size of Baton Rouge for probably another decade. Because of Mary Bird’s existence and the resources that the board has invested in over the years, now that we have this physics part- nership with LSU, we have the capacity to do it, the donors support it, so, hey, we’re going to have something in this state and region that’s 10 years ahead of when other communities are even thinking about hav- ing it. It makes us really excited to be part of this organization. Editor: Is there anything else you wanted to add?