Looking Towards the Future of Peritoneal Surface Malignancy Care

Following the release of new guidelines for the care of peritoneal surface malignancies, CancerNetwork® spoke with Kiran Turaga, MD, MPH, about what some of the crucial next steps are for continuing to improve care.

As he noted, a large part of the future of caring for this disease is in the hands of the trainees. Turaga stated that he noticed the younger professionals often had different ways of thinking and brought new levels of energy with them. Another large problem that these guidelines aim to address is the difference in opinions that many experts hold. One specific example that he gave was how some doctors prefer chemotherapy and others prefer surgery, and they hold onto their beliefs tightly.

Turaga is a professor of surgical oncology, assistant medical director of the Clinical Trials Office, division chief of Surgical Oncology and Surgery at Yale Cancer Center, and was the research lead for this undertaking.

Transcript:

The future is our trainees. One thing that I discovered through this process—we had over 70 surgical oncology fellows and surgery residents and medical oncology fellows who contributed to this effort, people who were excited and knew about the field, understood the problem, spoke to the patients and spoke to the doctors—is that they’re coming to this field with new energy, and thinking hard about how we can make a difference. That’s what makes any field move forward fast: having young, smart people who are going to bring fresh perspectives and better ideas to these problems.

No. 2 is, hopefully, we’ve broken some of these barriers between people where you posture on one side vs another side. People are starting to think we’re pushing in the same direction. Everyone—patients, doctors—we all want the same thing. We want people to live longer. We want people to live better. We all understand the suffering that patients are feeling with this. The way we’re approaching this is very siloed. “I’m a chemotherapy doctor, so I’ll give chemotherapy. I’m a surgeon, so I’ll do surgery. I’m a radiation doctor; I want to do radiation.” This is a huge problem, and it’s a pressing issue. Seventy thousand people in the US is not an insignificant number. That’s almost double the number of pancreatic cancers that are diagnosed, or one and a half times.

Reference

Butensky SD, Bansal VV, Su DG, et al. Consensus guideline for the management of gastric cancer with synchronous peritoneal metastases. Ann Surg Oncol. Published online June 25, 2025. doi:10.1245/s10434-025-17361-2