How Changes in a Tumor Have a Significant Impact on Treatment Options

Pharmaceutical Executive spoke with Dr. Brian Corgiat, senior clinical research scientist at Ignite Proteomics, about potential issues in the way that cancer treatments are prescribed. According to him, errors may be made in the way that tumors are tested, which can cause problems down the road for the patient.

According to Dr. Corgiat, treatment plans don’t always take tumor mutation into consideration. This is especially true when cancers resurface after initial treatments have ended and new tumors may have formed.

The solution is to view cancer tests as snapshots of a specific moment and measuring which proteins are being activated at that moment. If not, patients may receive treatments that are targeting elements of the tumor that aren’t activated and reduce the effectiveness of the overall treatment.

Pharmaceutical Executive: Do changes in a tumor have a significant impact on treatment options?
Dr. Brian Corgiat: If you have a change (such as a resistance mechanism), your old treatment is likely not going to work. You're targeting something that is no longer driving the tumor growth or expansion. If you're targeting the wrong thing, there's a high probability that your tumor is just going to grow and you're going to progress, and so I would say it's a significant issue.

If it's a as a major shift or even a minor shift, you want to be aligning with what is driving the tumor at that time.

If you're not targeting what the tumor is shifted to, then your treatment is likely going to be ineffective. You want to have a test or a readout of a biopsy of what is going on at that specific point in time to align the therapy with what's actually driving a tumor at that moment.

Using bad information or old information to guide treatment decisions is not what anybody wants. You're not going to have a highly successful response if you're charging the wrong thing.