New Cream for Skin Cancer
Reported December 26, 2005
TAMPA, Fla. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) — One million Americans will be diagnosed with skin cancer this year and most of them will have basal cell cancer. Now, doctors say a cream once used to treat genital warts may work against this common skin cancer and save patients from surgery.
Jeremy Smithberger spends most days in and out of his car for his job, causing to constantly soak up a lot of sun. Consequently he got skin cancer. “I had a couple of spots on my forehead and one on my lip,” he tells Ivanhoe.
One spot on his forehead turned out to be basal cell skin cancer. Surgery was an option, but there was a downside. “One of the things that they told me is they’d have to cut out here and they’d pull it together and there was a slight possibility it might pull my eyebrow up a little bit, you know, and I was like, ‘Oh, that wouldn’t be very good,'” Jeremy says.
Instead, Jeremy tried a cream called Aldara or Imiquimod, originally used to treat warts. Vernon Sondak, M.D., a surgical oncologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., says, “Sometimes a treatment that’s a little less aggressive than surgery is a good option.”
The cream creates an immune response to the cancer. The immune cells recognize the cancerous cells as foreign and attack them. Dr. Sondak says: “It’s not just a little cream that you rub it on, everything’s fine. It has serious side effects, and they’re part of the desired effect. We want an inflammatory response. We want a strong response against cancer.”
Jeremy’s forehead became red and scabbed, but eventually it healed and the cancer is gone. But Dr. Sondak says that’s because it was caught early. “We’re fortunate that if any of these cancers, including melanoma and the other aggressive ones are picked up very early, our cure rates are extremely high.”
Imiqimod is FDA approved for certain uses but not for treating most cancers. It often causes a severe reaction — that’s why it’s not routinely used on the face. In certain cases, however, your doctor may think the benefits outweigh the potential risks.
If you would like more information, please contact:
Moffitt Cancer Center
12902 Magnolia Dr. MBC-PR
Tampa, FL 33612
(813) 745-8482