The Jones Clinic, the only independent oncology practice in the Memphis area, recently hosted the 2015 Mid-South Cancer Treatment Outlook, and Dr. C. Michael Jones forecasts major advances in the coming year in the continued development of personalized medicine and immunotherapy.
"The major area you are going to see advances in is immunotherapy of cancer," Jones says. "This is an area that has been reborn since the 1970s, when researchers first began working on it. There was a lot of interest in it in hopes of recruiting the body's immune system to fight the cancer, but very little progress has been made until the last 10 to 15 years. Now there have been some dramatic improvements, in that there are drugs that now block the tumors' ability to evade the immune system by allowing the body to recognize them as foreign and destroying them."
He believes it's had a major impact already on the treatment of melanoma, and that it will also have a major impact on the treatment of renal cell cancer and lung cancer.
Jones is also seeing a trend toward oral drugs and away from intravenous chemotherapy and all of its inherent toxicities. He has already seen that in some diseases, like chronic myelogenous leukemia and lung cancer, oral drugs now are having an impact on survival.
"The caveat to that is that the tumor must be sent off for specific testing, and as the cost of doing that drops, I think you're going to see more and more of that," he says. "There are institutes such as Foundation Medicine in Boston where you can send the tumor specimen and have it sequenced to look for mutations for which there is a drug available."
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