On May 29, Nashville oncologists and researchers headed to Chicago for the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology conference. Among those in attendance was Todd Bauer, MD, associate director of Drug Development and principal investigator at Sarah Cannon Research Institute. Bauer said there were very clear take-home messages from the meeting.
“Immuno-oncology, or using medicine that enhances the system’s ability to control cancer, is going to continue to be a very exciting area in oncology,” Bauer said. “It’s very well tolerated and shows a significant benefit for long lasting responses.”
Targeted therapies, which consider specific mutations and genetics, also played an important role in the meeting. “We’re trying to better match therapies to patients based on specific tumor DNA,” he said.
NCI-MATCH Program
Another focal point was the NIH’s NCI-Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice (NCI-MATCH), a clinical trial that will analyze patients’ tumors to determine whether they contain genetic abnormalities for which a targeted drug exists (“actionable mutations”) and assign treatment based on the abnormality.
NCI-MATCH seeks to determine whether treating cancers according to their molecular abnormalities will show evidence of effectiveness. NCI-MATCH could add or drop treatments over time, and each treatment will be used in a unique arm of the trial.
The trial opens for enrollment this month with 10 arms. Each arm will enroll adults 18 years of age and older with advanced solid tumors and lymphomas that are no longer responding (or never responded) to standard therapy and have begun to grow.
SMART Precision Cancer Medicine
The meeting also served as an outlet for Vanderbilt University Medical Center to present a mobile computer application under development called SMART Precision Cancer Medicine (PCM), featured in a demonstration of improved cancer care coordination through clinical data interoperability and electronic clinical information sharing.
SMART (Substitutable Medical Apps and Reusable Technology) is a computing platform designed to allow apps to work with all manner of medical record systems. SMART PCM runs on smartphones and tablet computers and is intended one day to help cancer patients and their doctors understand and act on genetic test results. It communicates with medical records systems using a new interoperability language called FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources).
The demonstration highlighted the advantages of data interoperability by following a hypothetical colon cancer patient through risk assessment in the clinic, genomic testing, surgery, chemotherapy administration and home care.