Giving Compass' Take:

• Rachel Tompa illustrates why targeted cancer treatments are critical for improving outcomes for cancer patients.  

• How can funders work to advance the research around targeted cancer treatments? How can we work to make targeted treatments more equitable?

• Learn how to fund cancer research. 

There have been low points for Dr. Wenying Shou. When her father was first diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma while visiting her in Seattle, just a year after she’d joined the Hutch. When his oncologist told him his cancer was incurable and he likely had only two years to live. And when, after her father had beaten the odds and was in remission five years past his diagnosis, her mother, Lingyan Fang, was diagnosed with rectal cancer.

For Shou, both stories point to the importance of developing better, more targeted treatments for cancer.

If we really understood how things work, we might be able to design much more specific drugs that work much more potently, with much fewer side effects.

Her father benefited from one such approach: an experimental radioactive antibody developed at the Hutch that homes to cancerous cells in the blood, causing less damage to healthy tissues compared with total-body radiation. Zhonghao Shou had relatively few side effects.

These targeted therapies were not available for Fang. Because of the size and placement of her tumor, she had to have large sections of her colon and rectum removed. That procedure and the subsequent chemotherapy left her with long-lasting pain and chronic difficulties controlling her bowel functions that disrupt her sleep on a regular basis.

Read the full article the importance of targeted cancer treatments by Rachel Tompa at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.