Treatments for Cancer Now Closer to Home

Making it easier for cancer patients to receive treatment, a handful of Ventura County doctors today will begin new partnerships with UCLA’s cancer center, plugging into a network of more than 300 specialists and speeding cutting-edge treatments to county residents.

Selected physicians in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Ventura and Oxnard will now have access to the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA, a move that for the first time will allow patients to undergo the center’s experimental cancer treatments without leaving the county.

While standard treatments such as chemotherapy are readily available at local cancer clinics, patients in need of special care--including innovative treatments targeting certain breast, colon, pancreatic, lung and prostate cancers--often have to go outside the county.

“It brings to people opportunities they wouldn’t have locally,” said Dr. Samuel Edwards, chief administrator at Ventura County Medical Center.

“The idea is to bring new drugs to patients that may not have been available to them before,” said Dr. Harry Menco, an oncologist with offices in Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley.

“This is the future of how cancer medicine is going to be practiced,” he said. “As long as people are dying every day, just maintaining the status quo is no longer acceptable.”

Menco is among the handful of county physicians picked as affiliates in the UCLA program. The others are Simi Valley oncologist Bruce Zietz, and Kooros Parsa, Rosemary McIntyre and Ann Schrader Kelley, partners in Ventura County Hematology-Oncology Specialists, with offices in Oxnard and Ventura.

The agreements between UCLA and the local physicians are among 20 such arrangements being made with cancer specialists throughout Southern California.

Through these new partnerships, UCLA doctors and scientists hope to extend their research into communities throughout the region.

And, by building a network of cancer clinics, they hope to make the UCLA center more attractive to companies searching for a broad client base to test the latest experimental drugs.

“In the field of cancer, things are breaking so fast that so many [treatments] don’t get out into the community until really late into their development,” said Dr. Dennis Slamon, director of clinical research at the UCLA center.

“What we’re trying to do is take a lot of studies previously only available at UCLA and bring them into the community,” he said. “Our goal is to create a long-lasting, self-sustaining clinical research network in communities where patients live.”

Slamon estimates that UCLA will spend $8 million over the next six years to build that network, an effort that county officials say should help fill a gap in the delivery of health care services to local cancer patients.

Dr. Rosemary McIntyre said she and her colleagues have been talking to UCLA officials for more than six months about the new affiliation. And in recent weeks, a UCLA research nurse has been at their offices in Ventura and Oxnard to prepare for the partnership.

She said a good number of her patients stand to benefit from the new relationship.

“There’s a great deal of benefit to people having access to this cutting-edge technology,” she said, “but not having to travel all over the country to get it.”