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VINAY CHANDRASEKHARA: I think the future looks bright for patients with pancreatic cancer. For many years, we only had one or two regimens for treatment. Now, with innovation, we're able to offer a portfolio of treatment options and individualize treatment care, especially for patients with pancreatic masses. The conditions that we commonly see in the pancreas clinic are acute and chronic pancreatitis. Other very common conditions that we see are pancreatic cystic lesions.
ALIANA BOFILL-GARCIA: And sometimes, these patients, they have common conditions that present differently. So they need a different type of care. And sometimes, they're just very weird conditions that we know how to direct the care, because we have experience with them, because of the high volume patients that we see.
VINAY CHANDRASEKHARA: For evaluation of lesions in the pancreas, whether they're mass or cysts, we will often perform an endoscopic ultrasound. That really gives us the highest resolution of the pancreas.
ALIANA BOFILL-GARCIA: We are also doing a lot of advances with artificial intelligence. It helps detect or improve the current modalities that we have, such as images and endoscopic ultrasound.
VINAY CHANDRASEKHARA: If someone is found to have something in the pancreas, we're looking for a more minimally invasive approach to treatment of lesions. We are now able to offer endoscopic treatments. So we can put a small needle into a mass or even a cystic lesion. Not only are we taking that tissue or fluid off for analysis, but we can use those needles to then deliver novel chemotherapeutic agents, or novel treatment options, or ablative therapies in the form of heat or photodynamic therapy. The crux of treating patients with pancreatic cancer is detecting it early, to identify patients who are at high risk for pancreatic cancer and enroll them through a surveillance program.
ALIANA BOFILL-GARCIA: My goal is that we can further establish what we should do in order to detect these lesions before and provide a better care for these patients.
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