CARRIE LANGSTRAAT: Hi. I'm Carrie Langstraat. I'm a G1 oncologists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I have a joint appointment in the Department of Gynecologic Surgery and Medical Oncology. Today, I'm here with one of my partners.
BILL CLIBY: Hi, I'm Bill Cliby. I'm also a G1 oncologist at Mayo Clinic. And we're part of a larger group of surgical and medical specialists that treat gynecologic cancers at Mayo Clinic. And today, we're here to talk to you about recurrent ovarian cancer and how we treat that and how to think about that and what options are available.
So while none of us like to deal with the topic of recurrence-- we, as physicians, and you, as patients, would much rather not have to deal with this cancer again-- it's, unfortunately, a common event in ovarian cancer. But fortunately, we do have many options to treat ovarian cancer, even after it's recurred once and even a second or third time, to provide meaningful benefit to patients and extend life that's quite normal, for the most part, with minimal side effects. So that's what we're here to talk to you about today. And Carrie, so what are some of the options? If a patient has been diagnosed with the recurrence of their cancer, what do we think about in terms of ways to treat that?
CARRIE LANGSTRAAT: Sure. Some other things we think about or offer for our patients that have recurrent ovarian cancer-- the standard of care of care, chemotherapy; surgery; surgery with chemotherapy; and sometimes clinical trials. Chemotherapy depends on how far patients are out from their primary treatments. Often, we will consider using the same treatment that patient had when they had their first diagnosed with ovarian cancer as their next line of treatment, again, for their recurrent disease. But we do have many different types of chemotherapy that we consider for patients with recurrent ovarian cancer. We also often look for clinical trials for our patients with recurrent disease, as these offer possible treatments that are more effective or better than our standard applied chemotherapy.
BILL CLIBY: So if a patient's now hearing about clinical trial options, how should they think about that? What are the different types of clinical trials that are available and the benefits of some of them? Or what are the different phases?
CARRIE LANGSTRAAT: Sure. So phase I clinical trials are clinical trials with minimal preclinical data, but they do have some evidence that the drugs are safe, and there is some reason that we think that they might be effective in patients with ovarian cancer.
BILL CLIBY: So that might be a patient who has exhausted kind of standard treatments, but we're trying some new drugs to see if they work.
CARRIE LANGSTRAAT: Correct. So these are patients that maybe we don't have any other really good options for standard chemotherapy. Then, there are also phase II and phase III trials. And phase II and phase III trials offer treatment with medications that we know have efficacy or have an effect and impact on survival with ovarian cancer. And these are trials where often we're pairing the new drug against a standard of care chemotherapy. So we would consider this for patients that have recurrent disease, even in the first recurrence or second or third recurrences, if the patient is at that stage in their treatment.
BILL CLIBY: So fair to say, for those phase III studies, in particular, we're trying something that we think is at least as good as what we're currently using, and we're trying to see if it's better.
CARRIE LANGSTRAAT: Correct. Sometimes even the phase II trials are sometimes set up very similar to phase III trials and are attempting to answer that same question.
BILL CLIBY: And then, what kind of trials are available at Mayo Clinic? So why would a patient come to Mayo, for instance?
CARRIE LANGSTRAAT: So we have clinical trials that are offered nationally. That's often through the Gynecologic Oncology Group or from pharmaceutical companies. We also have a number of investigators at Mayo Clinic that have their own clinical trials that they have developed that they are moving forward with on a research purpose. Some of those include immune therapy trials. Some of those include targeted therapies with immune therapy or CDK1 inhibitors. But we have a large number of clinical trials that patients would be potential candidates for here at Mayo.
BILL CLIBY: And Mayo Clinic is one of the leaders in ovarian cancer research, and we're involved nationally in research. We have what's known as a National Institute of Health SPORE grant in ovarian cancer that brings together investigators to try to study new approaches to ovarian cancer, which is very useful and powerful for patients. So thank you for listening to us to talk to you about recurrent ovarian cancer. If you're a patient who's experiencing a recurrence right now, we're sorry that you have to go through this again. But we have a lot of options here at Mayo Clinic and a lot of hope.
And we can provide appointment details on mayoclinic.org. And we're happy to see patients for second opinions or for opinions on what next steps to take for management of their disease. Thank you for listening.
CARRIE LANGSTRAAT: Thank you.
