Integrating Biomarker Testing Into Clinical Pathways to Optimize the NSCLC Treatment Landscape

Janet Espirito, PharmD, Ontada, discusses the importance of education, awareness of technology, and support for providers and patients to utilize comprehensive testing so that patients can receive the proper treatment at the right time.

Transcript

My name is Janet Espirito. I'm a senior medical director with Ontada. Certainly we have seen rapid growth in the use of precision medicine, specifically across many oncology disease types, but especially in non-small cell lung cancer. With the rapid growth of newly identified genomic mutations and the approval of numerous targeted therapies and immunotherapies to treat those mutations increases the complexity of the treatment landscape.

We certainly know that testing is very important now with the identification of these mutations so that patients can get the right treatment at the right time and have the best outcomes with the treatment for their disease. As the landscape becomes more complex, it requires a multipronged approach in terms of making sure that there's education and awareness and technology and support for providers and patients to support comprehensive testing to ensure all the testing is being performed, so that patients can receive the right treatment at the right time.

Certainly, areas of opportunity in this area include continuing to bridge the structured to unstructured data challenge, tackling that challenge. We are in an era of lots of real-world data. Information is available as physicians are testing. These genomic tests often come in 15-page PDF documents that have to be deciphered and interpreted, and being able to use technology to be able to support the continued development of improved integration and awareness of the information in order to provide meaningful insights that are actionable and timely for them to be able to have the information that's retrievable in an interpretable way, and for decision making when selecting treatments for their patients as well.

Certainly, we learned from the real-world MYLUNG study that testing…patients are being tested, but not necessarily for all of the known biomarkers. The opportunity to participate in a consortium, bringing together stakeholders, physicians, life sciences companies, patient advocacy groups to help work together to help identify ways to solve for the issue is important as well. Certainly, from the MYLUNG study, from the retrospective protocol one, we were able to understand historic testing patterns.

We were not able to understand some of the reasons why patients were not being tested, and so that is one of the things that we were looking forward to as results from protocol two are released in terms of being able to understand the rationale for why biomarker testing was not performed. Certainly, there are a number of real-world clinical issues, insufficient tissue, the patient may not be in a good condition for biopsy.

Then certainly, as we look to implement various interventional protocols, this is part of protocol three, to be able to measure the effect of different interventions to hopefully improve comprehensive biomarker testing.