This opinion essay was published on September 24, 2024, in Inside Precision Medicine magazine, here.
EDITOR’S NOTE: As a membership-based nonprofit institution dedicated to the advancement of personalized medicine, the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC) is working to encourage the clinical adoption of the tools and technologies that make personalized medicine possible. The appended update is designed to inform Inside Precision Medicine’s readers about the Coalition’s progress during the past two years.
As this magazine’s readers may know, on October 31, 2022, PMC and its partners from Diaceutics and Reservoir Communications published a landmark article in JCO Precision Oncology that documented the scope and complexity of clinical practice gaps in personalized medicine.
Twenty years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, this paper provided the first in-depth look at the efforts of United States health systems to deploy potentially paradigm-shifting drugs that can be used to target specific genetic vulnerabilities in cancer cells. The study focused on non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), where more than 70 percent of tumors have molecular alterations known to have outsized effects in driving tumor growth.
The findings showed that personalized medicine strategies to deliver appropriate genetically targeted medicines reached fewer than 40 percent of patients who were diagnosed with metastatic NSCLC in 2019, with the attrition resulting from inconsistent testing and treatment practices.
Biomarker-guided personalized medicine can make a big difference for patients with lung cancer. Research indicates that individuals with lung tumors containing mutations in genes known as EGFR and ALK, for example, live significantly longer when they receive genetically targeted therapies. If patients are not being presented with biomarker-informed testing and treatment options, they are being unknowingly denied therapeutic possibilities that could help them live longer, healthier lives. The same principle applies for patients with many other types of cancer.
To encourage more consistent utilization of the tools and technologies that make personalized medicine possible, PMC publishes peer-reviewed research designed to inform administrators and clinicians’ efforts to improve their institutions’ practices related to personalized medicine for cancer patients. The Coalition and its member-research teams have published a quantitative instrument that can be used to benchmark an institution’s progress toward the clinical integration of personalized medicine, as well as a list of strategies that can be employed to close clinical practice gaps in personalized medicine.
The Coalition’s latest implementation study, titled “Improvements in Clinical Cancer Care Associated with Integration of Personalized Medicine,” was published on September 20, here.
Using data provided by six institutions within three regional health systems, the new study shows that institutions with higher scores on a multi-factorial assessment of personalized medicine integration are more consistently matching cancer patients with genetically guided treatment options. The findings suggest that by boosting their institutions’ personalized medicine integration scores, health system executives and clinicians in the United States can improve the quality of care they are able to provide to their patients.
For more information about PMC’s clinical adoption work, please contact Senior Vice President of Science Policy Daryl Pritchard, Ph.D., at dpritchard@personalizedmedicinecoalition.org.
