More than 800,000 people around the world receive a liver cancer diagnosis each year. For people with advanced disease, typically those with hepatocellular carcinoma or cholangiocarcinoma, immunotherapies offer new opportunities for treatment. Theodore H. Welling, MD, director of the Liver Tumor Program at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, discusses risk factors for developing liver cancer, as well as treatments for early-stage and advanced liver cancer as part of the Cancer Research Institute’s 2022 Virtual Immunotherapy Patient Summit.

“I would say we’re overall much more optimistic than we were several years ago,” says Dr. Welling, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “When I first started, we had essentially only one drug, which did not work very well. Now we have many drugs that are approved for various circumstances, and it allows a lot more investigation and innovation to see how these drugs may combine. And there are many other drugs, of course, being developed. So it is a very robust and active research time. But at the same time, we have a lot more tools to use as well.”

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