Early genomic profiling improves cancer treatment outcomes

Through a novel approach, the study employed pathologist-driven CGP testing making test results available 12 days prior to the patient's initial medical oncologist visit. The study found that the availability of test results at the initial visit influenced the early clinical decision-making process and led to over half of the patients receiving biomarker-driven targeted therapy or immunotherapy, which in turn significantly improved overall survival of 25 months for patients treated with targeted therapy compared to patients treated with chemotherapy alone.

By observing test actionability rates, therapy choice and outcomes across 3,216 advanced cancer patients across several cancer types, the study found:

• CGP test can identify actionable mutations based on either guideline-based treatment or clinical-trial matching for 67% of tumors, compared to only 33% of tumors with small-panel test
• 52% of CGP-tested patients received a matched targeted therapy or immunotherapy as opposed to 32% of patients who received conventional systemic chemotherapy alone. Patients who received a targeted therapy had significantly better overall survival as opposed to patients who received only chemotherapy (25 months vs. 17 months, p<0.001)

"Patients who received a CGP test in this study did so free of charge," Providence bioinformatics scientist and lead author of the study Alexa Dowdell, MS, said. "By removing the barrier that most often prevents patients from receiving this test, we were able to observe a sizeable cohort and witness the effectiveness of tumor molecular profiling and the precision therapies that often followed."

Using a natural language processing-based approach developed by Microsoft Research collaborators, Providence clinical researchers were able to quickly and efficiently parse through large sets of publications, clinical trials, and electronic health records. These AI capabilities assisted Providence researchers with genomics interpretation and clinical trial matching in the molecular tumor boards.

"These results further illustrate the paradigm shift in clinical practice in oncology," said Swaroop Aradhya, head of Medical and Clinical Affairs at Illumina. "Patients are seeing better outcomes from precision treatments based on a tumor's molecular profile compared to conventional approaches used to treat cancer.

Source:

Providence Health & Services