VIDEO: Combining different therapeutic modalities for advanced endometrial cancer

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Different therapies carry with them different side effects or what we call toxicities. And once you start combining treatments you have benefit of potentially targeting and killing cancer through different mechanisms, and that's exciting. But on the other side, you're potentially adding toxicities as we add additional therapies. And sometimes the toxicities can be unexpected. And so, it's important with clinical trials that we evaluate not just for efficacy of these new treatments or these combinations of treatments, but that we also evaluate for the toxicities and are they actually more dangerous than they are effective? And so fortunately with the addition of immunotherapy to traditional chemotherapy, we seem to see overall fairly favorable toxicity profiles. And so we have not observed substantially increased toxicities, but they're different kind of toxicities that we see with the more novel immunotherapies than what we're used to with chemotherapies. And that requires education of providers and team members and patients about what to look for with these toxicities, so we can ensure that we're safely administering them. We also have to be aware that sometimes the toxicities don't emerge immediately, but can actually emerge in patients later on in their treatment course or even after they've completed their therapy. So, as we innovate in this space, it's important that we are constantly evaluating in the long term for how patients do and to ensure that their toxicities don't build up over time. And then the other important thing to consider is are there rebound or paradoxical later effects? So potentially a novel treatment or the introduction of a novel drug therapy can improve outcomes, but potentially make tumors more resistant to later therapies if they recur. And so it's always important once again, to have long-term follow-up of patient populations in clinical trials and be cautious with early results that may be promising that we still don't know everything about both toxicities and later effects of these drugs. And so it's important to kind of continue to monitor these populations for safety.