Thing big, think different, think innovative. That’s the approach at Mount Sinai’s Center of Excellence for Liver and Bile Duct Cancer, Myron Schwartz, MD, Director.
Our collaborative team of world leaders in surgery, radiation oncology, interventional radiology, pathology, immunology, and immunotherapy finds solutions to give patients the best outcomes. We are the largest liver cancer program in the United States, with more than 400 patients with primary liver cancer presenting each year.
Learn More: https://www.mountsinai.org/care/cancer/services/liver
receiving a diagnosis of liver cancer or any cancer for that matter for the first time can be very scary and indeed facing liver cancer can be very challenging. We're here to help with that. Yeah, Welcome to our center of excellence for liver and bile duct cancer. We are now the largest liver cancer program in the United States, with over 400 new patients with primary liver cancer every year. Coming to us at Mount Sinai a Center of Excellence to me indicates that when a patient is coming to our center, they are literally receiving the best care in the world. Our mentality is think big, think different, think innovative. Let's come together and try to find a solution when somebody else couldn't find one for you. Many places have excellent surgery or excellent radiation oncology or excellent interventional radiology. It's very hard to find a place Where all those things exist under one umbrella. We really have leaders in the fields of surgery, radiation oncology, immunology, immunotherapy, pathology and radiology at Mount Sinai that focus on this. And they're all world leaders. One of the reasons we call it a Center for Excellence is we're bringing the strongest parts of our cancer center together to fight liver cancer. Yeah, more than any other cancer I can think of liver cancer and bile duct cancer require the input of multiple specialists in order to achieve the best outcomes. The point of a center of Excellence is not just to have a team of specialists, but to have a coordinated team who worked together on a regular basis. Gone are the days where somebody would go to a single doctor's office and then once that doctor cannot provide what the person needs anymore, they would hand off their care to someone else. We've set up our program so that all of the specialists who might need to take care of new patients with liver cancer are available at the same time. It's an old saying, But we're better together and individually. And the center of excellence provides for that, bringing those experts together, putting a lot of smart minds in a room really can help move the field forward in the treatment of these diseases. Yeah, I can say that now. We'll probably number one cent and concerns as well. We have an outstanding research team with seven laps working to identify novel targets and number of therapies for agriculture here at Mount Sinai. We are on the cutting edge of research and treatment with radio embolization. The radiation based therapy seeds the tumor area with small microspheres that are embedded with radiation and they destroy tumor from the inside. We focus specifically on using very high dose radiation therapies with stereotyped guidance called SpR T stereotype trick body radiation therapy, which is a treatment which delivers very, very precise grosses of radiation to the target, maximizing control of tumors and minimizing damage to healthy tissue. I run a variety of clinical trials looking at new therapies used to treat liver cancer. 24 patients go to surgery. These new therapies are actually prolonging life for patients who have liver cancer that has already spread. When you come here, you're going to get all of the potential options and what's best for you. We do complex for sections including vascular and biliary reconstructions when needed. But we also have a very robust, minimally invasive platform, which includes laparoscopic and robotic surgery. Our first option would be just to remove the tumor. The problem comes that most of these patients have underlying liver disease. So you can't just remove the tumor. You have to remove the entire liver and that's transplantation. So we have as much or more experience doing that than virtually any program in the country. One of the unique things we offer, from a surgical standpoint at the Center of Excellence at Mount Sinai is something called the hepatic artery infusion pump, which is a specific catheter and pump that delivers chemotherapy directly into the liver, which allows us to treat tumors directly. And that is a therapy that is not offered at many centers in the United States. But that's something that we have expertise in. Yeah. Yeah. I really think that without the connection that a patient feels on a personal level to a doctor, it's very hard to really get to the point where you can have the biggest impact on their overall condition. Palliative care is designed to provide an added layer of support to help deal with the stress of facing a serious illness. And it's really designed to complement the expert care that you're receiving from the team here at Mount Sinai for your liver cancer. Time counts when it comes to cancer. We make sure that everybody who calls is seeing the week that they call. We don't put people with cancer off and we make sure once they're here that they progress through the system quickly the patient comes in and by the time they go home, the course is set and plans are being made. We try our best to treat each patient as if he or she were our own family member patients have a lot to be optimistic about going forward. This is a very exciting time in terms of treatment options and outcomes as well as research. There is no question that Mount Sinai Center of Excellence will be at the forefront of new developments in the treatment of liver and bile duct cancers.
