Meet Dr. Harriet Kluger
September 10, 2021Information
Harriet Kluger, MD, discusses her care of patients with melanoma and renal cell cancers, and recent treatment advances.
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- 00:00I'm Harriet kluger. I'm a professor
- 00:02of medicine in medical oncology.
- 00:04I treat patients with Melanoma and
- 00:06renal cell carcinoma as well as
- 00:08patients with other types of skin
- 00:10cancers such as Merkel cell carcinoma.
- 00:12Towards the end of the 1990s it was
- 00:15becoming clearer and clearer that the
- 00:17big breakthroughs in understanding
- 00:19cellular biology would have major
- 00:20impact on oncology and therefore
- 00:22I decided to go into this field
- 00:24where I felt that I could actually
- 00:26make a difference in contributing
- 00:29not only to patient care but in.
- 00:31To moving the field forward
- 00:33by doing clinical research,
- 00:34I generally recommend that people come
- 00:36into their first visit with a family
- 00:39member or a caregiver simply because
- 00:41the first visit is very overwhelming.
- 00:43We give people a lot of information and
- 00:46I think it's hard to retain all of it.
- 00:49So second set of ears is always beneficial.
- 00:52When I started taking care
- 00:53of patients with cancer,
- 00:55we pretty much only had chemotherapy
- 00:57as the molecular abnormalities
- 00:58within the cancer cells became
- 01:00better and better understood.
- 01:01We were able to develop drugs that target
- 01:04those political molecular abnormalities.
- 01:06So, in Melanoma,
- 01:07the molecular lesions are mutations in a gene
- 01:09called byref primarily and in kidney cancer.
- 01:12We we have developed a whole slew of
- 01:14drugs that target the blood cell for the
- 01:17blood vessel formation within the tumor.
- 01:19So essentially,
- 01:20when we inhibit that,
- 01:22we starve the tumor a little
- 01:24bit of its nutrients,
- 01:25and that's very effective in kidney cancer.
- 01:27The other major approach,
- 01:29and that's where most of the
- 01:31breakthroughs have actually occurred.
- 01:33Is in immunotherapy for cancer,
- 01:34so these cells sit within
- 01:36a tumor microenvironment.
- 01:37They're not just sitting there by themselves,
- 01:40and if we can educate the immune system
- 01:42to recognize the cancer's foreign
- 01:44and then activate it a little bit
- 01:46further to attack those cancer cells,
- 01:49we can then essentially get rid of the
- 01:51cancer using our own bodies immune
- 01:53system as the ammunition to do so.
- 01:56We have two fantastic teams that
- 01:58we work with,
- 01:59one for skin cancer and one
- 02:01for kidney cancer.
- 02:02We're fortunate to have dedicated surgeons.
- 02:04Who understand the biology of the disease.
- 02:07They understand the drugs
- 02:08that they use that we use.
- 02:11They meet with us on a weekly basis
- 02:13and are able to tailor specific
- 02:16treatment plans for individual patients.