Residents gathered at College of the Canyons Performing Arts Center to learn about common misconceptions about cancer, and ways to debunk them, during UCLA Health’s “Demystifying Cancer” event on Thursday.
With appetizers and refreshments accompanied by a performance by the Guerra String Quartet, attendees gathered to hear opening statements by moderator Ed Masterson.
“As a member of our community, I would hope that I would speak on behalf of all of you in the audience in congratulating and thanking UCLA health for conceiving and envisioning this event tonight … that’s delivering phenomenal medical information in this very inviting, welcoming, soothing environment,” Masterson said.
Masterson defined the word, “demystifying,” stating that it means to “make something clear and easy to understand, to explain something so that it no longer confuses or mystifies someone.”
Dr. Alexander Black went onto the stage to discuss UCLA Health’s services in Santa Clarita, before playing a video with more information regarding the cancer treatment services provided.
“We believe in health and education,” Black said. “We do all general hematology, oncology consultations … We have all available special treatments, fusion treatments, which includes chemotherapy, targeted therapy immunotherapy, excellent radiation oncology.”
Joking that while the video was fun to create, he’d rather keep his day job, Black gave a lengthy introduction to keynote speaker Dr. Dennis Slamon, before revealing that Slamon is his boss.
Slamon is a “world-renowned UCLA Health oncologist, cancer researcher and developer of Herceptin, the ‘drug that changed the breast cancer treatment landscape,’” according to the program provided by UCLA Health.
Slamon took the stage to discuss the revolution of cancer medicine, along with the theory that cancer is more prominent than decades past.
“The revolution that’s happened in the last two to three decades in cancer medicine is a direct result of our enhanced information and understanding of the biology of the disease,” Slamon said. “It wasn’t so long ago in the 1800s that people lived into their fifth and sixth decade; then came the 1900s with the introduction of antibiotics — survival rate and lifespan increased significantly.”
According to Slamon, cancer is not a one-size-fits-all disease, but rather a disease that requires a new approach for each person.
“We have learned that there’s a diversity of human cancers; they aren’t just based on the organism that grows in lung, colon, prostate, breast cancer. Breast cancer isn’t a single disease, colorectal cancer isn’t a single disease,” Slamon said.
The traditional approaches in removing cancer, according to Slamon, are as follows: surgery, radiation therapy and systemic therapy.
Through systemic therapy, Slamon and his colleagues “use drugs to try and administer a drug systemically [or] intravenously that’s absorbed and goes throughout the body to reach cells that may have escaped that primary bed and kill them before they can start to grow into metastatic lesions.”
With living longer, billions of cells split each day, increasing the likelihood that mutations in the cells can occur, which may then result in cancer.
“If you’re not harboring an infection of some type or got exposed to the flu or bug, you’re making 17 billion new white cells to protect you from infection,” Slamon said. “Cell division occurs throughout our lives and the good news is we’re living longer. The bad news is that it puts us at more risk for cancer.”
All cancer, according to Slamon, is genetic, but only 10 to 15% is inherited.
“There are things you could do to try and minimize mutations that happen to genes,” Slamon said. “These mutations are not inherited, they’re acquired [and can] increase with tobacco smoke, alcohol, exposure to radiation, exposure to certain chemical carcinogens.”
Audience members could then participate in a Q & A forum. Along with Black, panelists included: Dr. Rena Callahan, Dr. Omar Sahagun, Dr. Gregory Senofsky, Dr. Nimit Sudan and Dr. Michael Xiang.
Robbie Gluckson, director of marketing at UCLA Health, said the event was intended to empower attendees with information.
“It’s a very powerful thing to bring cutting edge cancer care, knowledge, directly to the community, to the patients, to the caregivers. And that is what ‘Demystifying Cancer’ is all about,” Gluckson said. “This is the fifth one over a span of 12 years, and for us, this was months and months of planning because we now have such an incredible multidisciplinary array of services. Everything from medical oncology, surgical oncology, radiation oncology, oncological genetics, psychosocial oncology, nutrition, integrative medicine.”
Gluckson believes that through “Demystifying Cancer,” people can learn the breakdown of complex concepts.
“The idea was really trying to take complex medical issues and make them understandable to take away the fear.”
