Multimodal approach to cancer treatment with immunotherapy

In an interview with dvm360 at the Directions in Veterinary Medicine symposium in Nashville, Tennessee, Michael D. Lucroy, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology), chief medical officer of Torigen Inc, shares how he got his start in veterinary oncology. He also discusses how immunotherapy can be used in a multimodal approach to treating cancer in patients.

The following is a partial transcript of the video.

Michael D. Lucroy, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology): So way back 100 years ago when I was in veterinary school, looking at different career options, I like the idea of having kind of ongoing relationships like you would in general practice. But I thought that something like cancer would be more interesting as far as dealing with, kind of end-of-life issues. But also, just the idea of comparative medicine and the [idea that] things we learned in our dogs and cats can be applied to people.

One of our kind of guiding tenants of managing cancer patients is the idea of multimodal therapy. So any 1 thing can help, but when you do more than 1 thing, you get better results. And perhaps if you do all the things, you get an outstanding result. And so there are lots of data out there that show that combining immunotherapy with chemotherapy for example, or immunotherapy or other types of immunotherapy may, in fact, provide a better result.