Clinical Resource: Advancing Kidney Cancer Care

One area that I’m particularly interested in  is kidney cancer surgery and managing patients with more advanced tumors, complex kidney cancer  surgeries, and all sorts of different procedures related to kidney cancer care. Right now as  a urologic oncologist surgeon my focus is to do and perform kidney cancer surgeries. Either  removing the tumor or removing the entire kidney if we need to. Additionally, we might consider if  a patient meets some criteria to send a patient for additional treatments such as immunotherapy  or getting biopsies or even getting sometimes radiation if we think the surgery is too risky  for the patients but we have a lot of options nowadays to treat kidney cancer here at UAMS with  everything we can offer in terms of technology. Most commonly I think patients once they get  the diagnosis, once they get imaging done,

ultrasound or CAT scan the referred provider  will send those patients on my way but sometimes patients they do self-refer them to me to get  a second opinion to discuss treatment options what we would do next is there a need to get a  biopsy what’s the the treatments available for that tumor either be a kidney tumor, a prostate  tumor or bladder tumor what would be the next step for their treatment. It’s very exciting to  to talk about kidney cancer right now because we have so many new things coming up and not just  improving the surgery and getting more minimally invasive surgery to treating those tumors but also  integrating a lot of medical oncology to make sure

once I get a patient cancer free by my surgery  they will stay cancer free for many years to come because of the integration of immunotherapy for  instance. So I think it’s very exciting time for kidney cancer patients not only because they are  found we are finding those patients at earliest stages because of incidental findings once the  patient goes to emergency room or gets a scan for another reason but also because we are able to  provide more treatment options for those patients.