Conversation with The Cancer Letter

As the team lead by surgeon Stephen Chagares prepared a protocol for robotically-assisted mastectomy, the Institutional Review Board at Monmouth Medical Center provided guidance “every step of the way,” said Nicholas Fotopoulos, a research coordinator and an undergraduate at Princeton University in his sophomore year.

The University of Pennsylvania was planning a short-term trial for robotic mastectomies, but after an FDA advisory, investigators decided to revise that protocol to include assessment of cancer-related outcomes, said Ari Brooks, director of endocrine and oncologic surgery, director of the Integrated Breast Center at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, and professor of clinical surgery at Penn Medicine.

Robotic mastectomy deserves to be studied, because the procedure may improve cancer-related outcomes, surgeons at MD Anderson Cancer Center say.