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Talks with Docs: Ignacio Garrido-Laguna, GI Oncologist

Video Transcript

My Spanish is way better than my English so I see a number of this Spanish speaking patient, right. I don't know if it's by chance or because they are kind of, in a way, driven in my direction.

[Speaking Spanish]

My name is Ignacio Garrido-Laguna and I am a gastrointestinal oncologist with a special interest in pancreatic cancer.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Grenada, in the very south of Spain. It's in a way very similar to Utah, it's also by the mountains, in a valley. Granada has a ski resort that is only 45 minutes away but it's an amazing ski resort. I grew up skiing there.

What do you miss about Spain?

One of the foods that I really love in Spain, it's just very simple, it's just fried eggs, it's called plato alpujarreño which is just fried eggs, a special type of potatoes, and then chorizo, morcilla, jamón serrano, it's amazing. It's really, really good food.

When did you know you wanted to be a doctor?

In Spain you don't do an undergraduate, so when I finished high school you go straight into what will be graduate training here, and I did two years of dentistry school. My dad is, my dad was a dentist, and I realized quickly that what I really enjoyed about that was the human body, the physiology, understanding the mechanisms of disease, and so on, and the mouth was probably too small a space for me.

What do you see in the future of pancreatic cancer treatment?

It's definitely a great disease to work in, if you're interested in clinical trials because I do believe that the best is still to come and I think that we can look at the melanoma story. When I was in training back in Spain, we pretty much had nothing to offer to those patients with melanoma, right? And now you have a number of drugs to pretty much pick of your best choice for a patient with melanoma. I hope that we will see the same change in pancreatic cancer in the next few years. Of course, this is a completely different disease, right? But I think that there's plenty of opportunity to learn and to improve and to have an impact in the outcome of our patients.

Learn more about pancreatic cancer.

Cancer touches all of us.