According to the National Cancer Institute (Inca), between 2023 and 2025, around 704,000 cancer diagnoses are expected in Brazil per year. In the Federal District alone, more than 7,300 cases should be registered in 2023.
Cancer has become increasingly common in the world’s population, a rise stimulated by changes in lifestyle and diet in recent decades. But just as cases advance, treatments are also evolving. If a few years ago there were intractable types of the disease, today, cancer is on the way to becoming a chronic condition.
Oncologist João Nunes, from Oncoclínicas Brasília, says that one of the main advances in the area is immunotherapy, a technique that recruits the patient’s own immune system, stimulating the body to fight the tumor on its own.
“With the use of medications that make the tumor visible to the immune system, exceptional responses have been increasingly common in the treatment of cancers that, in the very recent past, brought a huge challenge to the patient and medical team due to the poor prospects for treatment” , emphasizes Nunes.
The doctor recalls other treatments that are advancing, such as the use of drugs combined with antibodies. In this type of treatment, the medicine is transported by the antibodies and released inside the tumor cell.
There is also CART-T cell therapy, which has already arrived in Brazil — the idea is to create a personalized medicine, developed from the patient’s defense cells, which are reinserted into the body to fight hematological cancers. Most of the time, a single dose of treatment is enough to control and cure the disease.
Another great advance is the development of techniques that associate active molecules to radiological tracers, used in nuclear medicine, with the use of substances used both for the detection and more precise classification of tumors, as well as for treatment.
The oncologist also points out that another option with a high probability of success is digital pathology, which combines artificial intelligence, big data and highly specialized medical knowledge to generate even more accurate analyzes for an assertive diagnosis.
“The digital transformation and implementation of computational intelligence tools have been proving to be highly effective in reducing the time to detect cases and indicating the best lines of care to be adopted for each patient”, concludes the doctor from Oncoclínicas Brasília.
genomic analysis
One of the main success factors in cancer treatment in recent years has been the customization of therapies. Genetic analysis has become a fundamental part of medicine, with oncology particularly benefiting from the diagnostic accuracy and treatment efficacy it provides.
By analyzing the molecular profile of the tumor, doctors can choose drugs that are more efficient and less toxic for each individual patient, thanks to a deep dive into the genetic arrangement of tumors.
Genetic testing can be used in a variety of cancers, including breast, endometrial, prostate, and gastrointestinal.
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