Understanding Endoscopy in the Realm of GI Cancers: An Evolving Field

In this seventh episode of OncChats: Understanding Endoscopy in the Realm of GI Cancers, Madappa Kundranda, MD, PhD, of Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Toufic A. Kachaamy, MD, of City of Hope, discuss the convergence of gastroenterology and interventional gastroenterology in gastrointestinal cancer management and the future of interventional endoscopy.

Kachaamy: There are a lot of exciting things happening. What excites you about the future of this field?

Kundranda: It is certainly exciting to look at the field evolving. We have gone from just surgical modalities for cancer care to not just trimodality care, but truly involving gastroenterology and interventional gastroenterology as a part of managing patients with complex gastrointestinal malignancies. What excites me is the opportunity that some of these minimally invasive interventions with interventional endoscopy can potentially help with organ preservation, maintaining quality of life, and preventing bad outcomes. In addition to that, some of the more exciting parts of this is, how immune modulation is changing with some of these interventional techniques, such as ablation. So, these are the 2 aspects which certainly would be interesting to see as the field develops in terms of where we land with this.

Kachaamy: Absolutely. Thank you for your time today and thank you to everyone for joining us.