Dr. William Russell specializes in radiation oncology in Baton Rouge. He graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Medicine in 1984.
Russell is double-board certified in internal medicine and radiation oncology, served six years in the U.S. Army and 16 years in the U.S. Air Force, and taught internal medicine at Wilford Hall Air Force Medical Center.
He currently has interests in prostate brachytherapy and conformal treatment planning for breast, lung, prostate, head and neck and gastrointestinal cancers at Ochsner MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Dr. William Russell, a radiation oncologist in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Most recently, Russell has worked to bring Pluvicto to Baton Rouge — a federal Food and Drug Administration-approved, breakthrough medication for patients with advanced prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body.
The medication could be life-changing for many patients in Louisiana, where prostate cancer remains the most common type of cancer in the state.
Nationally, about 1 in every 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and Louisiana’s rate is 32% higher than the national average.
What is the current level of care and treatment for prostate cancer?
Prostate cancer is obviously a very common cancer in men, and it's more prevalent as men get older.
Usually, men with prostate cancer are treated with either surgery or radiation. In rare cases, some other outliers that are used, such as cryotherapy and partial-prostate treatments, but the majority of men who have prostate cancer will not die from the disease.
There are a group of men (about 1 in 44), either despite local treatment or who already present with metastatic disease, are likely to die of their prostate cancer.
With prostate cancer, we just need to know who needs to be treated. We have a variety of tools at our disposal now.
Over the past decade, how have prostate cancer detection technologies improved?
The use of MRI for prostate cancer detection and the use of a scan called a PSMA PET scan have changed the game in prostate care.
We've also begun to move the dial with genetic testing — not the gene test people get in their blood, looking for a risk of cancer. This test is actually an analysis of their prostate cancer, their genetics and how likely this disease is to progress and cause pain and suffering.
I have a lot of patients with prostate cancer who don't need radiation or surgery. We just follow their progress. But when men start having higher risk factors, or they have imaging evidence of disease, that's worrisome.
The surgeons have gotten very good at surgical resection for prostate cancer — radiation oncology has come a long way.
When I came to Louisiana from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, we were the first center to set up three-dimensional treatment planning. That was a huge leap forward.
We have gotten better at understanding who needs to be treated, better at confining the treatment to the areas we want to treat, avoiding the organs we don't want to injure and have a better understanding of the biology of cancer.
I remember seeing early PET scans at Chapel Hill in the early '90s. Duke was one of the centers that worked on it. We were able to see cancer in cells and areas that appeared structurally normal.
In other words, everybody could understand better what stage their cancer really was.
But, even though we have gotten better at this, there are still men who develop metastatic disease.
Tell me how the new cancer drug, Pluvicto, works.
Pluvicto was recently approved by the FDA for men whose prostate cancer has not responded to standard treatments. It works by finding and attacking cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone, which can mean better results and fewer side effects.
Pluvicto is given intravenously once every six weeks for six rounds (six doses). It's a drug that is needed for a small group of men where therapy hasn’t worked, who only have disease we can see on a PSMA PET scan (a scan that allows us to see metastatic prostate cancer with a very high degree of specificity).
For that group of men who reached the point where they were resistant to therapies, this drug was able to prolong their lives by eight months, according to the initial studies.
Eight months doesn't sound like much, but it does if you're looking at a potential one-month lifespan with cancer.
While not a cure, Pluvicto offers hope — helping to extend life expectancy and slow tumor growth for men in our area who are battling advanced prostate cancer.
