Guest Speaker - Dr Phillip Parente

Dr Phillip Parente is Acting Director of Cancer Services at Eastern Health based at Box Hill Hospital.

Phillip explained that cancer is a proliferation of cells. One in every two people are diagnosed with cancer and one in every three die of it.

In general, lung cancer is decreasing as fewer people take up smoking but currently more women die of lung cancer than breast cancer.

Generally, patients want to know two things:

• What is it?
• Where is it?

The first question is answered by histology and other tests and the second relates to what Stage it is in and where it has spread.

The unit conducts both investigator and pharmaceutical clinical trials in a variety of tumours including lung, melanoma, upper gastrointestinal, colorectal, genitourinary, gynaecological cancers and sarcoma. Studies are mostly Phase II or Phase III large collaborative studies with clinical studies streamlined into tumour streams.

There have been major changes in cancer treatment in the past decade. Some of these include:

• Multi-disciplinary approach (oncologist, radiotherapist, physician, surgeon, pathologist, radiologist, nurse)
• Unified treatment (best practice approach)
• Endocrine therapy
• Chemotherapy (curative and palliative with fewer side-effects and lower toxicity)
• Targetted therapy