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In this exclusive 番茄社区app video, Bridget Adcock, MD, an internal medicine resident at the Cleveland Clinic, discusses her poster presentation of a retrospective cohort study examining whether treatment with immunotherapy for a primary cancer might prevent or delay the development of secondary cancers.

Findings from were presented at the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

We currently know that immune therapy works better than chemotherapy alone, and the advances of immune therapy are skyrocketing at a rapid rate within the cancer world. And so knowing that it decreases the risk of our cancer from coming back or that primary cancer, we think that it also decreases risk of cancer in general. So patients that are at super high risk based on lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol use that increase [cancer risk], we may be able to eventually give immune therapy and prevent cancer in those populations.

We are also looking to genomics and the genetics of these cancer types through next-generation sequencing, and we'll be able to look at those genetics and then see who may be at increased risk for cancer and then maybe they would be a correct patient that we could use immune therapy in to prevent cancer.

So, for our research, we took all-comers that were diagnosed with specific cancer types based on the NCCN [National Comprehensive Cancer Network] guidelines, and we ended up with a cohort of around 20,000 patients. From there, we cleaned the data to make sure that we had their clear treatment history and looked back retrospectively to determine whether or not they were diagnosed with the secondary cancer. We excluded anyone that was diagnosed with a recurrence of the first cancer type. And we found that immune therapy prevents or decreases the risks of secondary cancers by 67%.

So what does this mean for the cancer world? This means that immune therapy is able to detect cancers at the early stages before they become clinically relevant. And by doing that, we will hopefully be able to treat patients that are at the highest risk for cancers proactively.

We know in the cancer world that it is most important to detect cancers early, and by using current treatments that we already have for cancer, we may be able to find more patients and help them prevent cancer in the future. This will eventually be able to hopefully be worldwide.

And our hope for the future is that -- we have two hopes: The first one is that we will be able to do translational research and determine how immune therapy is able to prevent or detect these cancers at the earliest stages. And then secondarily, we hope to do a clinical trial with patients that may be at highest risk for cancer and eventually be able to prevent them from getting cancer in the future.

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