The past decade has been an exciting era in healthcare for patients and providers with the increasingly broad adoption of precision medicine in drug development, clinical trials, and approvals. The rise of precision medicine means patients have access to targeted, potentially more effective, therapies based on their genetic responses to treatment pathways. Jane Li at Thermo Fisher defines why in many regions, a distributable NGS CDx may be far more advantageous than a centralised lab service NGS CDx as a global solution that can be deployed locally, cost-effectively and with a fast turnaround time to drive the broadest adoption of targeted therapies.
Extract:
‘The Case for a Distributable CDx Model’
The past decade has been an exciting era in healthcare for patients and providers with the increasingly broad adoption of precision medicine in drug development, clinical trials and approvals. The rise of precision medicine means patients have access to targeted, potentially more effective, therapies based on their genetic responses to treatment pathways. At the forefront of this trend is oncology. In oncology alone, by 2019, more than 160 biomarkers were approved for targeted therapy selection by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Further, more than 90 percent of pivotal clinical trials currently underway are to evaluate drugs aimed at specific molecular targets for the treatment of cancer.
The trend of precision medicine development particularly in oncology is not only happening in the United States, but also across Europe and Asia Pacific regions. In Japan, for example, the Lung Cancer Genomic Screening Project for Individualized Medicine project (LC-SCRUM) was established in 2013 as a National Cancer Screening Program to screen target genes in lung cancer in an effort to advance the development of new molecular targeted drugs and diagnostics. As of August 2020, LC-SCRUM has expanded to more than 200 institutions in Japan and six institutions in Taiwan. LC-SCRUM is now in phase 4 of its program and continues to expand cancer screening in additional Asian countries.
Other countries have launched their own precision medicine initiatives as well. In the United Kingdom, the 100,000 Genomes Project was launched to better understand rare diseases and cancer with the aim of integrating personalised data into healthcare delivery. The World Economic Forum has also established a precision medicine program to encourage collaboration between governments, industry, academia and patient groups to ensure more patients have access to advances in precision medicine on a global scale.
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