Meet the specialists on the cutting edge of sarcoma research.
For the patient with a rare cancer, such as sarcoma, finding hope can be especially problematic, writes a cancer surgeon. Making patients hopeful, he writes, about their medical journey is as important as the medical components of treatment.
Our efforts at Wendy Walk are helping to fund the pediatric sarcoma work of Stephen Gottschalk, MD. Learn more about Dr. Gottschalk in the below article, which originally appeared on Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy.
Discovering new skin lumps or bumps on your arm or leg can be worrisome and many times be met with a range of emotions from anxiety (“Oh no, it must be cancer!”) to complete denial (“It’s probably nothing or has been there for a while”). It’s easy to jump to conclusions when discovering new bumps on the skin, and you might assume it to be a cancer lump. Being able to identify potential skin cancer symptoms is important. It may be hard to decipher whether or not the lump or bump looks harmful to the typical eye, which is why it’s important to talk with your doctor about lumps that are growing in size, or are painful, regardless of where they are located on your body.
Although sarcomas are rare diseases, it’s important for patients to know that they’re not alone. There are numerous local and national patient advocacy groups dedicated to increasing the awareness and knowledge of sarcomas among patients and their caregivers, and to providing support. You can find pages on Cancer.Net that list support organizations for soft-tissue sarcoma, Kaposi sarcoma, sarcoma of specific organs, bone cancer, and GIST.
“I have no doubt that new gene therapies will become the solutions we need to fight cancer. They are already transforming the world of medicine…Researchers around the world are really just beginning to scratch the surface. There are many barriers, but there is incredible potential…Gene therapy offers our best hope for real progress toward real cures.”
Dr. William W. Tseng is the Associate Professor of Surgery at the University of Southern California.
“Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy is a very forward-thinking organization. It recognized the potential for new cancer gene therapies very early on and that foresight is paying off. In the next 50 years, I think we’re going to see cell and gene therapy become the part of medicine where the most dramatic advances are made.”
Unless you or someone you know has been diagnosed with it, odds are you probably don’t know too much about sarcoma. It’s an extremely rare type of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society, accounting for just one percent of all adult cancers and 15 percent of all pediatric cancers.