Life-Saving Surgery in Lung Cancer May Be Uncovered Through Information-Seeking

After observing minimal recurrence following 70 double lung resections within Northwestern’s Double lung transplant REgistry Aimed for lung-limited Malignancies (DREAM) program, Ankit Bharat, MBBS, suggested that stage IV lung cancer may be curable during an interview with CancerNetwork®.

Bharat is the chief of Thoracic Surgery in the Department of Surgery, Harold L. and Margaret N. Method Professor of Surgery, and professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care at Northwestern Medicine Feinberg School of Medicine.

Bharat suggested that patients who have exhausted all their options at a local community center would benefit from attempting to reach out to other practices, citing an instance where a patient searched across international lines to find treatment at Northwestern that ultimately saved her life. Acknowledging that not every center may provide the full scope of options for a patient with advanced cancers, he explained that patients may have to take matters into their own hands and proactively seek information themselves. He concluded by expressing that the success of the DREAM Program presents an opportunity to test the hypothesis of whether stage IV cancer is curable, challenging conventional wisdom that suggests that palliative care is the only option for these patients.

Transcript:

If patients do not have any other options left by their local center, they should do some research on their own and try to reach out [to other practices]. [One patient I had] was told nothing further could be done, but she searched and found us across international [lines]. That is the reason she is alive today.

That’s going to be important in the future, because there [is] a much freer flow of information, but [it] is a lot of information… Not every center knows everything that is out there. Patients have to take that in their own hands and [take] time to find out and seek more information, particularly when it comes to a life-saving situations.

For [our] physicians and health care [system], the fact that we have [cared for] almost 70 patients within the DREAM Program and not seen high recurrence, it does give us an opportunity to test the hypothesis that maybe stage IV cancer is curable. People think that stage IV cancer is not generally curable. You can only do palliative [treatment], but it may be possible. We have to start thinking about that. We achieve that with what we have observed based on the success of the DREAM program so far.