The main theme of the discussion is the interdisciplinarity, it’s the importance of having specialists of different fields giving their own looks to the cancer genetics. Cancer genetics is a term mainly constructed by the work of people of many backgrounds – the clinical oncologists, the cancer surgeons, the cancer geneticists, specialised psychologists, specialised nurses and many other professionals who are actually dealing with the genetic aspects of cancer, the different contributions of genes to disease, in this case cancer.
The interdisciplinarity works with many aspects of this field. The whole purpose of this session at this meeting was to join together the oncologists, psychologists, surgeons, researchers, clinical geneticists, all working in one aspect of their work, that is cancer genetics. This session is of utmost importance to be present and be replicated in other cancer meetings here in Brazil and all over the world.
Cancer genetics is an aspect of clinical oncology which is very neglected by the regular oncologists. The actual role that oncologists do is being helped by the status of the patient, the staging of the disease and the history, to fit the patient in certain lines of treatment. These lines have plenty of variety, in every year they change. The whole practise of oncology is fitting the patient in these lines. So when a patient has something that does not go well and does not respond to the treatment then they put him in other lines and other aspects and other branches of practise. It may not work, and that’s the whole point of cancer. Sometimes we do our practise and the patient does not respond to the treatment, why so? There are many reasons for that but genetic influence may take a role.
This session was the first one in a Brazilian meeting that was the beginning, the upcoming of new drugs speciality developed for people with genetic mutations in some genes, in this case the famous BRCA1 and 2. The question of previvors takes place whenever our practise gives a role to many patients which have genetic results of testing, of cancer tests, and they are not affected by cancer. In this case Angelina Jolie was the most famous one in this aspect, she was the first previvor to make the oncogenetics, the cancer genetics field, be known all over the world and we thank her a lot for that. She made our work very, very easy after she revealed her ordeal to the whole world.
That’s the main aspect of round tables like the one we took part in today, to help the regular oncologists, help the oncology community, to know about genetic aspects of diseases and how they interact with them in ways that they couldn’t even think of.
