The False Economy of Genomic Analyses

While Dr. Nagourney is enjoying Spring Break with his family, here is a very topical subject in light of the constant press given to genetic testing.

Dr. Robert A. Nagourney - Rational Therapeutics - Blog

We are witness to a revolution in cancer therapeutics. Targeted therapies, named for their capacity to target specific tumor related features, are being developed and marketed at a rapid pace. Yet with an objective response rate of 10 percent (Von Hoff et al JCO, Nov 2011) reported for a gene array/IHC platform that attempted to select drugs for individual patients we have a long way to go before these tests will have meaningful clinical applications.

So, let’s examine the more established, accurate and validated methodologies currently in use for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer. I speak of patients with EGFR mutations for which erlotinib (Tarceva®) is an approved therapy and those with ALK gene rearrangements for which the drug crizotinib (Xalkori®) has recently been approved.

The incidence of ALK gene rearrangement within patients with non-small cell lung cancer is in the range of 2–4 percent, while EGFR mutations…

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Outliving Hospice

For those of you who have read my book Outliving Cancer you will recognize the chapter entitled “Outliving Hospice.” It is the description of one of my lung cancer patients.

The saga began in 2005, when this gentleman with metastatic lung cancer under the care of the Veteran’s Administration in Los Angeles presented to our group requesting a biopsy for an EVA-PCD assay to select therapy. Diagnosed some months earlier his lung cancer had progressed following first line platinum-based chemotherapy. He was deemed untreatable and placed on hospice.

At his request, one of our surgical colleagues conducted a biopsy and identified a treatment combination borrowed from work done some years earlier by Japanese investigators. It worked perfectly for a year allowing him to return to a normal life.

At year two however, he relapsed. At that point, we confronted a dilemma – would we accept the inevitability of his progressive disease, fold our tent, and allow the patient to return to hospice care; or conduct yet another biopsy to determine the next line of therapy? If you have read the book, then you know how the story plays out. The new biopsy revealed the unexpected finding that the tumor had completely clocked around to an EGFR-driven cancer, highly sensitive to erlotinib (Tarceva). Placed upon oral Tarceva, he has been in remission ever since.

When I saw Rick, two weeks ago at our six month routine follow up he provided a copy of his February 2014 PET/CT scans which, once again, revealed no evidence of progressive disease. With the exception of the skin rashes associated with the therapy, he maintains a completely normal life. During our discussion he apprised me of an interesting fact. His survival, now approaching 10 years, according to him, constitutes not only the longest survivorship for any patient under the care of the Los Angeles VA, nor any patient under the care of the VA in California, no, he is the longest surviving actively treated metastatic non-small cell lung cancer under the care of the Veteran’s Administration. Period! While I cannot, with certainty, vouch for this fact, I am quite certain that he is among the best outcomes that I have seen.

There are several points to be gleaned. The first is that every patient deserves the best possible outcome. The second is that hospice care is in the eye of the beholder. The third is that patients must take charge of their own care and demand the best possible interventions available. As an aside, you might imagine that a federal agency responsible for the costly care of tens of thousands of lung cancer patients every year would pay attention to results like Rick’s. Might there be other patients who could benefit from Ex-Vivo Analysis for the correct selection of chemotherapeutics?  One can only wonder.

Two Women with Metastatic Breast Cancer – Same Age, Same Disease, Two Very Different Functional Profiles

A day in the life of advanced breast cancer. Two different 37-year-old breast cancer patients, both mothers of young children, were seen in consultation on the same day.

The first had been referred by a colleague who was concerned that the patient’s ER positive breast cancer had disseminated to her brain despite aggressive standard chemotherapy. She was to undergo a craniotomy and a portion of fresh tumor would be submitted from the surgery to Rational Therapeutics for EVA-PCD functional profiling.

The second mother had metastatic triple negative breast cancer, which recurred after aggressive standard chemotherapy. She underwent neo-adjuvant treatment (preoperative) but at the time of her surgery, there was no evidence of response to the treatment. By the time we met her, only months into her diagnosis, new areas of metastatic disease were cropping up daily.

The EVA-PCD assay results on these two “similar” patients were entirely different.

The results of the first patient with the ER positive tumor and brain metastases clearly identified treatments directed toward the PI3K pathway, with or without chemotherapy. We are recommending a combination of Everolimus plus chemotherapy.

The second patient had a completely different profile. Indeed, the degree of drug resistance was quite striking. A three-drug combination was among the most active from almost two dozen drugs tested.  The other option appeared to be a new class of drugs called the cyclin dependent kinase (CDK) inhibitors.

On a functional level, we used targeted drugs to probe for sensitivity to inhibitors of these cancer signal pathways. Unlike genomic profiles that tell you whether the gene is present or absent, we can tell whether the gene is driving the tumor. Functional profiling.

One patient is now under my care and the other will begin treatment under the care of a colleague in Orange County, CA. We will await results of these assay-directed therapies and wish these two young patients every success.

Why Do Cancer Surgeons Cure More Patients Than Medical Oncologists?

Surgery remains the most curative form of cancer treatment. While the reasons for this are many, the most obvious being earlier stage of disease and the better performance status of the patients, there are other factors at work. Surgeons tend to be rugged individualists, prepared to make life and death decisions at a moment’s notice. The surgeon who enters the pelvis expecting an ovarian cyst only to find disseminated ovarian cancer must be prepared to conduct a total hysterectomy and bilateral ovary removal if he/she is to save the patient’s life. It is these types of aggressive interventions that have that revolutionized the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer.

What of the medical oncologists who, with the exception of leukemia and some lymphomas, confront diseases that are difficult to eradicate and for which treatments can be toxic? Trained as incrementalists, they do not expect cures so much as palliation. Their role is not to make hard decisions, but instead to rely upon precedence. Educated in the school of small advances, these physicians are not rewarded for individual successes but they are harshly criticized for any departures from community standards.

Deprived of the opportunity to make bold decisions, medical oncologists follow opinion leaders who instruct them to accrue to standardized protocols. As meaningful advances are few and far between, enormous numbers of patients must be accrued to provide sample sizes with any hope of achieving statistical significance. Among the most disturbing examples of this approach was a trial reported in patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer. The study compared single agent gemcitabine to gemcitabine plus erlotinib. The trial achieved an improvement in survival that led the FDA to approve the two-drug combination. Yet, the actual improvement in median survival was a mere 10 days. The authors beamed, “To our knowledge, this randomized phase III trial is the first to demonstrate statistically significantly improved survival in advanced pancreatic cancer by adding any agent to gemcitabine.” (Moore, MJ et al J Clin Oncol, 2007). To the average observer however, a clinical trial that required 569 patients to improve median survival from 5.91 months to 6.24 months (10 days) would hardly seem cause for celebration.

Medical oncologists have become so accustomed to these marginal advances that they are unmoved to depart from standard protocols lest they be accused of breeching guidelines. This might be acceptable if chemotherapy provided meaningful benefits, but the extremely modest advantages provided by even the best clinical trials scream for medical oncologists to think, well, more like surgeons.

While community oncologists think it heresy to step around a National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guideline, investigators at the best institutions, the opinion leaders, have begun to question the merit of blind protocol accrual and come to recognize that many critical questions cannot be easily answered through the current trial process. Questions such as the role of liver resection for colon cancer patients with disease spread to the liver or the role of additional chemotherapy after that liver surgery, simply may not lend themselves to randomized trials. In a review of the topic by one of the leading investigators in the field, Dr. Nancy Kemeny from Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York examined this dilemma, “The management plan for each patient should be decided by a multidisciplinary team, it may not be possible or ethically defensible to perform large randomized adjuvant trials comparing chemotherapy with surgery alone or comparing modern chemotherapy with older regimens. It may be reasonable to extrapolate from adjuvant trials and meta-analyses showing predominantly disease-free survival benefit. Each decision on postoperative chemotherapy should be viewed in context of prior treatment, surgical preference and individual patient characteristics.”

How refreshing. Finally a clinical investigator has recognized that patients must be managed on an “individual basis” regardless of what the clinical trial data does or does not support.

The concept of personalized medicine flies in the face of contemporary guideline driven treatment. Individualized care is on a collision course with the NCCN. It is time for medical oncologists to reclaim the high ground in doing what is right for patients, using resources that enable them to make smart decisions and to eschew standardized care. In cancer, the dictum “one size fits all” is more accurately “one size fits none.”