VIDEO: Understanding tumor landscape, biomarker development needed in cholangiocarcinoma

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

A need to develop more effective therapies. And in order to do that you need a better understanding of the tumors itself. So need a better understanding of the make up or the landscape of cholangiocarcinoma. There's a still a great deal of unknown regarding the tumor microenvironment of cholangiocarcinoma, regarding the interaction of the immune cells and other components of the microenvironment and the cancer cells. And so we really need to leverage emerging technologies such as single cell cell technologies to have a better understanding of the tumor landscape of cholangiocarcinoma. Once we have a better understanding, that will allow us to develop treatments that are better at targeting the various components of the tumor. And so the hope would be that they would be more effective treatment options with more durable response. Another research area that we need to focus on is biomarker development. Better biomarkers are absolutely needed. Biomarkers can help the the diagnose the disease at an earlier stage and they can also help gauge response to therapy. So for instance, if a patient is receiving a certain type of therapy we have an effective biomarker that tells us how that can sort of predict response to therapy. That's what we need, and we currently don't have that. And so for instance, there's a great deal of interest in the value of cell-free DNA for diagnosis of cholangiocarcinoma. And so not only diagnosis, but also monitoring of cholangiocarcinoma in patients who are under treatment. And so these are all areas that that are active areas of research but we do need to focus more efforts on these areas to get a better handle on, on really this highly lethal, devastating cancer.