How Testing Tumors After Recurrence be Improved

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: In what ways can testing tumors after recurrence be improved?
Dr. Brian Corgiat: One of the ways is a test that looks specifically at what's driving a tumor per se more so than what's the stable phenotype of the tumor. That’s a lot of genetic testing and a lot of immunohistochemistry testing.

You're going to get a very a somewhat static response if you either have the mutation or you don't. There are some cases where you maybe will induce a mutation, but those are a little more static across time.

We really like to have a test that can actually look at what's driving your tumor as you take out that biopsy, and so you want that snapshot. What we like to think about a phospho proteome, or active switches. The question is: is this protein inside the cell on or off at this specific time?

You can start to then say that in this recurrent tumor or this biopsy we have right now in front of us, what really is driving that tumor? You still will have some of those mutations, and you still will have some of those IHC readouts. But whether those are what is driving the tumor at that specific time is really missing in a lot of tests. And so, adding that to the panel of tests would be really exciting.