Howard A. "Skip" Burris, III, MD, FACP, FASCO, president, clinical operations, and chief medical officer of Sarah Cannon Research Institute, discusses differentiating which patients will benefit from next-generation sequencing (NGS) and the role of NGS testing for matching patients to clinical trials.
Howard A. "Skip" Burris, III, MD, FACP, FASCO, president, clinical operations, and chief medical officer of Sarah Cannon Research Institute, discusses differentiating which patients will benefit from next-generation sequencing (NGS) and the role of NGS testing for matching patients to clinical trials.
Transcript
While next-generation sequencing can benefit patients who can be matched to a targeted therapy, not every patient receives this benefit. How can you differentiate which patients should receive this testing?
I think that gets to one of the challenges around education on molecular profiling and next-generation sequencing (NGS). There’s a lot of discussion on should I profile this patient? And my answer to that for where we sit today is we don’t know, We want to think of the stereotypical patient that needs it or an aggressive patient that needs it, and we really need to profile all or current relapsed patients. We don’t know about utilizing these tests in the adjuvant, post-surgery setting, but once someone’s had standard of care or once someone has metastatic disease, I urge my colleagues to profile at that point and understand the biology of the tumor.
Sometimes, it will give you a direct match to a therapy, and other times it will give you a sense of just how aggressive that tumor is or whether the patient’s appropriate for immunotherapy.
Does NGS also have a role for matching patients to a clinical trial is there is no approved drug for their disease?
NGS testing is absolutely a driver for enrollment in clinical trials. Just one anecdote that we presented last year at ASCO [American Society of Clinical Oncology] was that if a case was presented at one of our molecular cancer conferences—so the patient had been profiled and brought to this molecular tumor board—there was a more than 2-fold improvement in the odds of that patient going on a clinical trial, up from about 5% to 8% for our group as a whole to 18% to 20%. So, creating the conversation, being educated as to the aberration that are found, and then thinking about what trials might be appropriate, maybe not always the exact match of the target, but really the conversation about what type of trials might be a good fit for the patient.
Increasing Lp(a) Awareness for Better Cardiovascular Health: Dr Mary McGowan
March 24th 2024For Lp(a) Awareness Day, Mary McGowan, MD, FNLA, chief medical officer of the Family Heart Foundation, highlights how most people with elevated Lp(a) are completely unaware that they have this increased risk and calls for increased testing.
Read More
Exploring Medicare Advantage Prior Authorization Variations
March 26th 2024On this episode of Managed Care Cast, we're talking with the authors of a study published in the March 2024 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care® about their findings on variations in prior authorization use across Medicare Advantage plans.
Listen
Kathy Oubre on Strategies to Mitigate Challenges When Adopting New Payment Models
February 23rd 2024While adopting new payment models can come with challenges, there are strategies that can help oncology practices optimize their approaches, said Kathy Oubre, MS, CEO of Pontchartrain Cancer Center.
Read More
Getting to Know Dr Shauna Downs, Public Health Nutritionist
February 23rd 2024Shauna Downs, PhD, MS, is an associate professor in the Department of Health Behavior, Society, and Policy at the Rutgers School of Public Health. A former figure skater, her research now focuses on interventions to promote healthy and sustainable food choices and exploring how our changing climate, food systems, diet, and nutrition are inextricably linked.
Read More