Infectious Complications of Chemotherapy

00:02 Other therapeutic complications.

00:04 And I mentioned when you have marrow ablation, you're going to have, going to be at a profound risk of developing infections.

00:13 Here we're showing the heart on a patient who had acute Myelogenous Leukemia, AML got successful chemotherapy that killed off the tumor, but at the same time caused neutropenia.

00:27 In the left atrium here, you can see a rather large fungating mass extending down on to the valve And when we looked at that histologically, it ended up being fungus.

00:39 It is a huge fungus ball.

00:41 You can actually see the filamentous fibers on the left hand side on a standard H and E with the inflammatory response around them.

00:48 They are better highlighted with the methenamine silver stain that you see on the right.

00:53 And this patient died not because of their AML but because of the chemotherapy that we gave them to treat the AML that led to a systemic fungal infection that the patient couldn't fight off because they didn't have neutrophils, or a good, robust T-cell response.

01:13 So with that kind of morbid thing in mind, most of the time, a lot of the time, we're successful in treating cancers, we're getting better and better but because of the unwanted untoward side effects that can occur with any of our therapies, right now, we can't do therapy with surgical precision that just gets the cancer and doesn't have consequences elsewhere.

01:36 So just keep that in mind, and hopefully, one of you, many of you will help us do a better job of arriving really targeted therapy for cancer patients.