Robin Kate Kelley, professor of clinical medicine in the division of hematology/oncology, University of California, San Francisco, dissects biliary tract cancer.
Transcription:
My name is Katie Kelley, and I’m a GI Medical Oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco. In my research as well as clinical space, I focus on a rare type of cancer, which is biliary tract cancer. Biliary tract cancers are a heterogeneous group of cancers arising within or around the liver and deriving from cells that comprise the biliary tree, including intrahepatic bile ducts, the ducts that drain the secretions from the liver, the perihilar bile duct that connects the liver ducts down to the extrahepatic ducts, and the distal biliary tract or the distal bile duct, as well as the gall bladder.
Biliary tract cancers collectively are rather rare, probably with around 10,000 cases per year or less for the individual subgroups in the United States. They’ve been historically a very difficult group of cancers with poor prognosis, median survival around a year or less.
Well, we think biliary tract cancers have several challenges that we find in other types of GI cancers, like pancreas cancer, which are the challenge of being inherently chemo resistant in some cases and not having as robust a response as we’d like to chemotherapy.
They also have the challenge of anatomic complexity in that many patients with biliary tract cancers, whether intrahepatic, extrahepatic, or gall bladder, have competing comorbidity of biliary obstruction or infection or both, meaning that the outcome of the cancer is tightly linked to these other high-risk comorbidities, specifically biliary tract infection or blockage.
Another such comorbidity in some patients is co-existing liver dysfunction from either the burden of cancer itself, or a pre-existing condition like hepatitis B or C virus or cirrhosis or fibrosis from other reasons that lead patients to be struggling with not only just the cancer, but also underlying liver dysfunction or failure.
Putting all of that together, one of the key fundamental challenges that we think leads these cancers to be poor prognosis is both not great responsiveness to our standard chemotherapy arsenal, and these competing comorbidities that make everything more challenging.
To learn more about Biliary Tract Cancer and other cancers: https://checkrare.com/diseases/cancers/