Joint Statement on Practice and View to the Future

With a vibrant future ahead, Interventional Oncology (IO) will continue to provide the oncologic community and patients with cutting-edge treatments and proven therapies in a wide array of disease processes. Here we review the state of the major advances in our field with a view to the future.
Y90 continues to widen and deepen its potential as a treatment option beyond HCC, and even beyond the liver. While we have only begun to scratch the surface of the latter application, the comfort level of operators and its stablished safety profile make it a tempting choice for tumor embolization especially given its relatively mild post-embolization syndrome. We should expect to see more data emerging on Y90 both in and beyond the liver.
As the abilities of IO practitioners become more apparent to other specialties, we should expect to see much more activity and research in the area of musculoskeletal and "exotics and occasionals", and we should not be surprised as this latter category transforms into "the everyday". Musculoskeletal interventions to this point have been scarcely explored in most practices, and yet the data on its efficacy are quite compelling as a palliative treatment.

The intimidation factor is strong, however, especially when one factors in the addition of hardware to the equation. Our expectation is that this barrier will continue to erode, and these more aggressive interventions will become more commonplace as the market demands them. New integrated and independent residencies in interventional radiology with dramatically strengthen the clinical acumen of interventional oncologists placing them, at a minimum, on par with our surgical and medical oncologists. Discussions on the clinical care of oncology patients will serve to foster our understanding and the clinical needs of the patients that we treat. 
We still have some ways to go on our understanding of, and contribution to personalized medicine and immunotherapy in IO. We will be especially keen to issue some information to our readers as to how IO can be used in conjunction with some of these new medications (i.e. anti-PD1, anti PDL1, anti-CTLA). We believe Interventional immunotherapy will be a leading field of future innovation in IO.

There remains much to integrate into our practices about the fine points of biopsy and tissue analysis, and regarding what role we will play in the future of the delivery of therapeutic agents. This latter question holds great hope for the world of IO, as no other specialty is so well positioned to deliver targeted therapy.
As more data is collected from trials and analyses as presented at CIO, our proven techniques continue to elevate as sought-after and accepted treatments in cancer therapy. To that effect, important study results we will be covering this year will be combined data from SIRFLOX, FOXFIRE and FOXFIRE global.