Chapters Transcript Video Richard Van Etten, MD, PhD shares a year of advancements in cancer care at the UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center Richard Van Etten, MD, PhD shares a year of advancements in cancer care at the UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. As an academic medical center with a cancer center and one that's designated by the National Cancer Institute, we do a couple of things different. For example, from community oncology practices, first is we have nationally recognized experts in all the many different types of cancer, and they're about maybe 150 different types of cancer depending on how you count. Secondly, we provide true multidisciplinary care for those cancers where it's important, for example, for breast cancer and for head and neck cancer, prostate cancer, cancers like that. And what I mean by that is we bring together teams of specialists to develop a coordinated care plan so that um the time between initial diagnosis and getting on treatment is shortened. The third thing that we do is we offer clinical trials. That's the only way that we can move the ball forward in cancer and improve cancer care. We have the largest portfolio of clinical trials in Orange County, California, over 350 open to accrual. And when patients participate in clinical trials, they should understand that in cancer we're not comparing your treatment to a placebo or a sugar pill. Your treatment is compared to the standard treatment in cancer, and we are offering as an alternative a treatment that we believe and that we already have preliminary evidence is better, and the purpose of the trial is to confirm that it's the only way for patients to get access to the very latest cancer treatments, drugs and devices before they're approved by the FDA. UCI Health and the Chi Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, um, launched Orange County's only adult hematopoic stem cell transplant program about 4.5 years ago back in May of 2020, and the program has grown very, very quickly. We're currently doing about 100 transplants per year, so that's really accelerated things. The importance of the program is that it offers Orange County residents this life saving procedure and keeps the care close to home. Because when people get out of the hospital after their transplant they can still be really sick and they may need to be seen up to 3 times a week and having that care here close to home makes that much easier for the patients and for their families. The transplant program also serves as a platform for what we call cellular therapies. These are some of the most advanced immunotherapies where we engineer patient cells to leverage the patient's immune system to help attack cancer. Only centers that have a transplant program are really qualified to be able to offer these latest types of cell therapies. Created by
