Costa Rica News – A Costa Rican doctor, Cecilia Monge, is exploring personalized treatments for cancer in the United States. She led a study to seek better therapies based on genetic, protein and molecular characteristics of the tumors.
She performs her subspecialty at the National Cancer Center of the United States. There she developed research and later presented it at the European Association of Medical Oncology Congress.
She came to understand that it is not enough to know where the cancer develops in the body we must know how it does. In that way, two people with tumors in the same body part may be treated in completely different ways because of what caused the tumors. The doctor seeks to give specific personalized treatments to patients in order to give them more hope and a higher quality of life.
Some of the combinations of molecular pathways derived from Monge’s research are already approved for Phase I trials. She hopes to find ways to give better treatment with fewer secondary effects and bring this knowledge to Costa Rica.
