The American Cancer Society predicts that more than 2.1 million people will be diagnosed with cancer in 2026—that’s 5,800 diagnoses every day, with the highest incidences in adults ages 65-74.

But there’s hope for cancer patients and their loved ones. Treatments are evolving faster than ever thanks to new technology and breakthroughs in research. And Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute (FCS) is one of the cancer centers at the forefront, bringing these new breakthroughs to local patients. FCS has more than 200 oncologists working in 100 offices throughout the state of Florida, including in Sarasota.

Dr. Manish Patel, the medical director of drug development for FCS’ Sarasota, Lake Mary and Lake Nona offices, leads the institute’s early-phase clinical research and works with pharmaceutical companies to bring new trials to FCS patients.

“These trials give patients first access to innovative therapies, and they’re moving very quickly,” Patel says. “It used to take a drug more than 10 years to get approved. Now, if trials go well, they can get approved in four or five years.

“For our patients and our practice, that means we can see these drugs in early-phase trials, then continue with them in our late-phase trial program until the drug is approved,” he says. “We have the opportunity—and luxury—of seeing the drugs evolve, because our practice runs both early- and late-stage clinical trials.”

In the U.S., the most well-known cancer research centers are Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, M.D. Anderson in Houston, and Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. But treatment at those institutions requires patients to fly across the country, often when they’re feeling their worst due to side effects from treatments or disease progression. At FCS, local patients can receive access to the same drugs currently in trial at those major institutions, with the relief of being just a few minutes from their homes.

And, Patel says, drug development has made significant progress since the advent of standard chemotherapy, historically the most common treatment for cancer patients.

“Chemotherapy evolved, and then immunotherapy became hot, which is finding ways to activate your immune system to attack the cancer,” he explains. “Now we’re seeing different ways to activate the immune system using biospecific antibodies, like CAR-T therapy [which uses a patient’s own T-cells to attack disease, most commonly in blood cancers like lymphomas, leukemia and multiple myeloma], or antibody drug conjugates [ADCs], in which your antibodies release a drug into the cancer cell.”

Patel is particularly excited about targeted therapy, in which cancer drugs attack certain types of cancer mutations. For example, more than 90 percent of pancreatic cancer patients—a disease with a dismal survival rate that’s often diagnosed in its late stages—have a genetic mutation known as KRAS, which promotes cancer development. Today, scientists are able not only to target those KRAS mutations, but do so in different ways. That means that if you have a KRAS mutation and find a trial aimed at the variant, “it’s like personalized treatment,” Patel says. “The pharmaceutical companies have gotten to such a specific level of developing these targeted drugs.” 

Right now, there are 70 early-phase trials open at FCS’ Sarasota location targeting a variety of types of cancers. Approximately 400 patients are in early-stage clinical trials throughout the institution, with several hundred more in late-stage trials.

And, Patel says, the excitement is not just about new drug development—it’s about response rates, too. “Immunotherapy, ADCs, targeted therapy—we’ve never seen response rates like this in the past,” Patel says. “Our slogan is world-class medicine, hometown care. This is the epitome of that.”