Effective Methods of Accurately Measuring Tumors

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: What is an effective method of accurately measuring tumors?
Dr. Brian Corgiat: What we do is we look at the phosphoproteome. So, we are looking at phosphorylation states within the cancer of a specific patient at a very specific time.

We'll get a biopsy, and we'll say, “this is actually the active switches and this is looking at what the actual drug targets.” By looking at the phosphorylation state of these proteins, and we can hone in on whether IHC can tell you if a protein is present.

But, it can't really tell you if it's on and or driving the patient's tumor. We know these proteins are there, and now we can assess whether it's really on or off. Then we can say if there’s a therapeutic designed to target this protein.

If we're not really seeing that it's turned on, but we do see over here that these things are actually turned on, we may want to consider some of these other therapeutics that target these things that are actually turned on at this specific time.

We can really look at a snapshot and say, "Hey, this is what's turned on inside your cell, and this is where we think you should maybe take a look at some of these therapeutics, and maybe use those as treatments."