How Tumors Change Over Time, and How This Impacts Treatment

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: How do tumors change over time, and how does this impact treatment?
Dr. Brian Corgiat: Tumors are effectively cells, right? They're living, breathing cells, and so tumors can easily change over time. Whether it’s just through the course of natural development and biology, but also (typically in the cancer space) if you're applying some sort of therapeutic or drug toward a cell, you're going to kill off some of the cells that are active in certain parts, then you're going to see some of those cells survive.

Or you're going to see some resistance mechanisms in some of the cells shift, and so the cells that may survive or are going to be slightly different than the initial ones, or if these resistance mechanisms start to click on, they're going to be different than that kind of original cell.

This is why when you'll see tumors early on, they might be very different than what you see in a recurrent or later tumor. That's partially why it’s important to look at snapshots of these things to hopefully help align the therapeutic with the current tumor.