Isaac Yi Kim, MD, PhD, MBA, chair of the Department of Urology at Yale School of Medicine, specializes in the treatment and management of prostate cancer with the goal of helping patients navigate and better understand their disease. Although he cares for all men with localized disease, his clinical and research focus is in men with high-risk disease, recurrence after radiation, and metastatic prostate cancer to lymph nodes, bones, lungs, and abdominal organs.
Dr. Kim is an expert in minimally invasive robotic surgery and has performed more than 2,100 robot-assisted radical prostatectomies, which are surgeries to remove the entire prostate gland. In addition, he has established a same-day radical prostatectomy program by using the latest-generation da Vinci robot to remove a diseased prostate through a single, one-inch incision in the abdomen. This results in less pain—and pain medication—for the patient, who usually goes home the same day of the surgery.
He was inspired to become a prostate surgeon during his medical training, when he decided he wanted to help men he saw struggling with complications such as impotence and incontinence, which often develop after prostate cancer surgery. Those post-surgery problems are less common with expert robotic surgeons, he says. “I see what an impact and a difference the surgical robot has made in helping our patients and allaying their fears.”
As a professor at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Kim is also a surgeon-scientist who is studying the mechanism of prostate cancer treatment resistance. He is the principal investigator in clinical trials focused on advanced and metastatic prostate cancer, providing surgery in men with Stage IV prostate cancer. He says the traditional paradigm shows that when cancer cells have escaped the organ of origin, it’s too late to help. But his early data is showing that removing the prostate may enhance the effectiveness of chemotherapy and hormonal therapies for men with late-stage disease.