Dr Michael D'Angelica on the Necessity of Multidisciplinary Collaboration in Hepatobiliary Cancer

Michael I. D'Angelica, MD, FACS, director of the Hepatopancreatobiliary Fellowship Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses multidisciplinary care and why it is so important in hepatobiliary cancers.

Transcript

Can you speak to the importance of multidisciplinary care in the treatment of hepatobiliary cancers?

When I think about the hepatobiliary guidelines, it really comes down to this idea that it truly has to be multidisciplinary. I think we say that for every cancer, and it's obvious that it's important. But in some cancers, it's really not as prominent as it is in hepatobiliary cancers, where you need the expertise of certain types of surgeons, transplant surgeons, surgical oncologists, or medical oncologists; but also a gastroenterologist to manage things like biliary obstruction, or interventional radiologists to perform intraarterial therapies and percutaneous ablation techniques. And again, these cancers really do require true multidisciplinary care, and i think it's critical that centers have all of this expertise if they're going to manage these cancers.