Dr. Magliocco Featured in Article on Genomic Profiling
Protean’s CEO& Founder Dr. Magliocco has been featured in an article by Chris Anderson for Inside Precision Medicine, on the topic of genomic profiling and precision medicine.
Read an excerpt from the article below, or the full article here.
“According to Anthony Magliocco, founder and president of Protean BioDiagnostics, the key to clinical utility of CGP is to provide a concise, focused report that provides direct guidance to oncologists on the actionable alterations, while also providing a support system that might include a virtual tumor board the doctor can consult, as needed, to aid in therapy selection.
‘This is of the highest importance,’ Magliocco noted. ‘Oncologsits feel threatened by these very complex reports, because they feel that they need to do something with it. We want to condense that report down into what do you do next: Here’s this recommendation based on current guidelines, or these things are possible based on your own judgment.’
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As Magliocco sees it, continuous improvement in reporting is vital to helping break down resistance to using CGP as a part of oncologists’ regular practice routines. ‘If we don’t do that, they’re not going to use it because they don’t understand it, and it looks like alphabet soup. The report needs to help them know where to start,’ he says.“
Good cancer care is also about getting patients enrolled in an appropriate clinical trial. With clinical trial participation already low, finding more patients to qualify who can be enrolled both helps to get new targeted therapies approved, while also being of clinical benefit to these patients. CGP is uniquely positioned to achieve these goals.
‘It’s a very effective tool,’ Magliocco says. ‘There are so many trials today and if you’re not testing, you’re not going to find the eligible people. By running CPG, you’re actually considering the patient for hundreds of potential trials, so the odds that they’re going to get onto one would actually be quite high.’
This makes the argument that in the clinical setting, virtually all patients with advanced cancers should be tested with CGP. This would effectively turn the old model of recruiting patients to trials on its head, where typically a patient would be tested for a specific marker to see if they would qualify. Instead, using CGP, the test queries hundreds of biomarkers for a patient’s cancer and the results can then be compared to the biomarkers needed to qualify a patient across all active trials to see if there is a match. With the growth in basket trials, the potential is even greater as these biomarker driven studies seek to discover a number of different cancers that may be treated with the same drug.
It’s not surprising then, that companies like Found Medicine and Tempus, which are performing CGP have also begun clinical trial matching programs for patients who take these tests. And increasing the use of CGP in the community oncology setting helps to provide broader access to a population of patients that haven’t typically been involved in these studies.
Yet despite this broader reach, Magliocco still believes pharma companies will continue to have difficulty filling their trials, largely because they will be recruiting for cancers that affect ever-smaller cohorts of patients.
‘Going to the future, they’re never going to be able to complete these trials,’ Magliocco contends, ‘because there aren’t going to be enough people in the world. You’re going to have to do a personalized approach with matching to the therapies and then a monitoring approach using imaging or liquid biopsy to ask ‘Is this patient showing signs of responding? Or is the tumor evolving, and we’re going to have to switch therapies?’ I think it is going to be more about managing chronic disease and seeing how the tumor is changing, or if it is going back to a previous form. The treatments may bring the cancer back to a previous state and it might be sensitive again to an original treatment, several lines ago.””
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