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Collaboration essential to rapid transfer of knowledge from trial to clinical practice
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PARIS – Bringing together academic cancer centers, industry partners and non-profit organizations is the quickest pathway to implementation of the personalized cancer therapy being researched globally, said the chairman of the WIN Consortium here.
Both the WIN Consortium and Symposium are motivated by “the goal of speeding up the transfer of scientific knowledge in clinical trials and eventually into the standard of clinical practice,” chairman John Mendelsohn, MD, past president, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said at the WIN 2013 Symposium.
John Mendelsohn
WIN (Worldwide Innovative Networking) consists of 30 member organizations on 4 continents, including 20 academic cancer centers; pharmaceutical and technology companies; and non-profit organizations, Mendelsohn said. He said the academic centers in the Consortium "represent a wide diversity of populations of patients and a wide diversity of skills in clinical trials."
Early achievements
Mendelsohn listed some recent achievements of WIN including the development of a plan for a philanthropic foundation; the launch of WINTHER, a clinical trial on personalized cancer medicine; and the launch of the Biomarker Registry which records prospectively clinical trials that study developed biomarkers (win.biomarkerregistry.org).
With the launch of WINTHER, WIN had a call for additional trials and as a result received 15 submissions. These submissions are being reviewed by the WIN Scientific Advisory Board which is chaired by Richard L. Schilsky, MD.
Future plans
WIN wishes to prioritize the discovery of useful biomarkers and diagnostic markers particularly in the blood which can help to identify the presence of cancer and identify which drugs are likely to work in which patients.
WIN is “thinking in a systems biology approach where a number of markers would be looked at simultaneously and grouped together in pathways and a very imaginative approach that we would like to help pioneer,” Mendelsohn said. WIN is also looking “rationally” at combined therapies and clinical trials that seek to match a patient to a drug based upon the abnormality of their tumor and then have access to the drug. He noted that access to the drugs “seems to be biggest roadblock in many institutions that are sequencing the genome of the tumor and not being able to get a hold of the drug because it is still an experimental drug or off label use of an approved drug.”
“Sharing and open sharing and complete sharing” of laboratory and clinical data on evolving genetics, molecular, immunologic and other characteristics of patients’ cancer and their outcomes is important, he said. “Right now the data are siloed and in the control of the principle investigator in an academic institution or pharmaceutical company and the obstacles to sharing data and mining it for what it can teach and are really greater than the obstacles to obtaining the data.”
This symposium is the fifth consecutive meeting and is endorsed by ASCO, ESMO, EORTC, INCa and UICC. WIN is accepting memberships from venture capital and private equity and are open to new members as WIN is seeking to increase its scope and size, according to Mendelsohn.
Disclosure: Mendelsohn is a consultant for Capital Royalty and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals.
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