A clinical trial of a liver cancer treatment at the Goshen Health System Center for Cancer Care, the only one of its kind in the United States, is yielding promising results, says Dr. Seza Gulec, who oversees the study.
Gulec, who heads the endocrine surgery, hepatic oncology, molecular imaging and position emission tomography programs at the Goshen Center for Cancer Care, led the fourth annual clinical symposium on liven directed therapy in Chicago recently. The Goshen center hosted the event.
During the symposium, he presented his groundbreaking study on the treatment of liver cancer that has reached the threshold of 20 patients and is returning positive results. The process is called Y- 90 microsphere Selective Internal Radiation Treatment (SIRT).
"We use millions of spheres loaded with Y- 90," a radioactive element whose high energy can kill cancer cells, Gulec says. The element is injected into a certain blood vessel that goes to the liver.
"This blood vessel feeds 95 percent of the tumor," but brings less than 20 percent of the total blood to the liver, he says. "One canselectively send radiation to the tumor They go seek the cancer. These kinds of things fall under the nuclear oncology program."
The trial, started in January 2006, is the only one of its kind in the United States. It uses chemotherapy with SIRT (Chemo-SIRT) to treat colorectal cancer that involves the liver. Recently some Australian and European programs started a similar protocol.
"They plan to involve some U.S. sites as well," Gulec says, but the Goshen trial is 18 months ahead.
"This treatment was approved in the United States in 2002. All the centers in the United States have been doing this treatment when all other treatments fail. We use it upfront as a front-line treatment."
"Our results have been outstanding," he says. "All the patients showed favorable responses as measured by PET/CT imaging," with some results more dramatic than others.
Gulec, a native of Ankara, Turkey, got a medical degree at Ankara University. He trained in nuclear medicine and nuclear oncology at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, in general surgery in Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans and in surgical oncology at the John Wayne Cancer Institute.
He has written about lymphatic mapping, sentinel node biopsy, radioguided surgery and radionuclide therapy and won honors from the American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer and the Society of Nuclear Medicine.
Gulec, who came to Goshen from the John Wayne Cancer Center in Santa Monica, Calif., in July 2004, is involved in research on both treatment and diagnosis of cancer. He is board-certified in both surgery and nuclear medicine.
"I was heavily involved with research," Gulec says. "I was impressed with the vision and mission of the Cancer Center as well as the resources available as well as the support system."
At the cancer center, he heads the endocrine surgery, hepatic oncology, molecular imaging arid positron emission tomography programs. He also is continuing extensive research.
"We are working on coming up with new agents that would diagnose cancer earlier," Gulec says, by paying attention to more specific features of cancer such as growth rate and blood flow.
"We're working on new agents to diagnose cancer early - to look, investigate and analyze."
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