The United States government has acknowledged the expanding role and importance of precision medicine with research and funding initiatives.
- Precision medicine initiative
- The national cancer moonshot initiative is a coalition of resources (eg, pharmaceutical industry; biotechnology, academic and community oncologists; etc.) to advance access to improved cancer care.
- Big data/data sharing
- CancerLinQ (learning intelligence network for quality) is a health information technology system developed by ASCO that uses real-time medical data (diagnoses, genomics, treatments and outcomes) from patients with cancer.
- Physicians can query the database to make more informed care decisions based on data from other patients with similar diagnoses and treatment plans.
Precision medicine clinical trials are currently underway, including genetically based clinical trials in which patients are matched to different treatment arms based on genomic alterations rather than cancer diagnosis (eg, histology), also known as basket trials.
- ASCO-TAPUR (Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry) — 15 treatment arms
- NCI-MATCH (Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice) — 21 treatment arms
Additional trials are underway to determine the role of targeted therapies in earlier lines of therapy.
- ALCHEMIST (Adjuvant Lung Cancer Enrichment Marker Identification and Sequencing Trials) — EGFR- and ALK-directed therapies
- PEARLS study — PD-1/PD-L1–directed therapies (immunotherapy); study of pembrolizumab vs. placebo for participants with non–small cell lung cancer after resection with or without standard adjuvant therapy
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