Biotech Strategy Blog

Commentary on Science, Innovation & New Products with a focus on Oncology, Hematology & Immunotherapy

Posts tagged ‘ctDNA’

ESMO24 Preview 7 – Lighting Up Early Stage Research

While many observers following ESMO and WCLC next month will be keen on watching the phase 3 trial readouts, there’s plenty of insights to be gleaned from other research too.

For example, if we want to maintain market share of existing therapies on the market then we may need to devise solid strategies for handling combinations in the face of new competitors.

Ideally, these should be rational based on information around acquired resistance or immune escape.

Increasingly research on biomarkers as well as genomic and even transcriptomic data is becoming more commonplace.

Here we shine a light on a number of key studies, which may help us move forward with future clinical trials…

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ESMO24 Preview 5 – Late Breaking standouts

Standing out from the crowd

In the fifth of our ESMO 2024 Previews we turn our attention to the late breaking abstracts since the majority of the titles were released this week.

The European Society for Medical Oncology has long been renowned for its late breakers and on clinical data, in particular.

Out of all of the available options – there were over 70 of them so far – which ones stood out from the crowd and why?

The selection chosen here are varied in nature and range across seven different categories…

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Shining a beacon

Shining a beacon on key GI trials

After covering a lot of science of late it’s now time to review some recent clinical data, discuss some of the implications of the findings, and their potential impact.

After all, science doesn’t exist in a vacuum and how it translates into outcomes in people living with cancer is an important part of the process.

Can we help them live longer and feel better are two important questions to ask when looking at study readouts.

Let’s not forget there’s quite a difference when considering the exposure of light from a lighthouse beacon versus a typical torch.

The former is designed to produce an extremely powerful, far-reaching beam that can propagate over long distances. A torch has much more modest lighting capabilities suitable for short-range use. The exact brightness difference depends on the specific lighthouse and torch, but it can reasonably be assumed the lighthouse beam is orders of magnitude more intense.

In a similar fashion, we need to look at phase 1 and 3 trials through different lenses, just as we ought to do with the potential 14th agent to market versus the first…

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Making a difference in aggressive lymphomas

Lugano is such a glorious place to hold a cancer meeting!

You can tell how much fondness attendees and presenters have for a meeting location when many start off their talk with a shot of the scenery and remember fond times of past conferences.

Lugano and the International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma (iCML) – held every two years in odd numbered ones – is clearly one such event.

It is here where we learn about the broader context in terms of how various phase 3 trials truly fit in the landscape and whether or not they are practice changing, what the skinny is on a raft of new products in a given category from practitioners in the trials, including problematic or emerging side effects, or how agents might be more effective in one particular subset but not another, and so on.

This year’s meeting is no different despite the virtual nature of the event.  After a couple of recent on-line meetings were a bust due to an inability to host the volume of attendees, one might be forgiven for being a tad nervous this one might go the same way – but these fears were not realised, I’m delighted to say!

Instead, we were treated to a very well organised event with a series of high quality talks and posters on a variety of lymphoma related issues, including rapid turnaround for the on-demand recordings the next day for any sessions one missed.

BSB subscribers can read more on our latest look at key hematologic developments relating to lymphomas  – you can log-in or click to access our ongoing oncology coverage.

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Is blood TMB ready for prime time?

One key emerging area of growth (and importance) in cancer research is the validation, and hopefully clinical use, of more convenient and less invasive biomarker tests based on body fluids rather than tumour biopsies aka ‘liquid biopsies’.

With a glut of recent data now available from several trials, some of which might be considered controversial, and more to come in the next raft of cancer conferences, it seemed a good opportunity to take stock and see where we are, what we have learned, and importantly, where we are heading in this fledgling field.

In the BSB hot seat today we have our latest thought leader interview, where we discuss these issues and gain their perspectives on the latest round of data with blood TMB and whether it is turning out to be clinically useful or not…

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EACR Cancer Genomics Day 1 Update #CG17

Cambridge: the third annual European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) conference on cancer genomics is underway at Churchill College in the UK. (Official Twitter hashtag: #CG17).

Churchill College, founded by the former Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, is a short 15 minutes walk from the historic city centre and has an edgy modernist field to it, with thought provoking sculptures scattered throughout the grounds. It’s a far cry from the more romantic and dreamy spires of Oxford portrayed in the TV detective series, Morse and Lewis.

Despite all the interest in cancer immunotherapy and immuno-oncology, it’s important to remember that cancer remains a disease of the genome, which is why we decided to cover this meeting for the first time. It has an impressive line-up of keynote speakers, as well as researchers presenting posters.

All too often now on the cancer immunotherapy conference circuit, it’s the same thought leaders giving a repeat of their ‘party piece’ standard “keynote” talk so it’s refreshing to hear new voices who are at the leading edge of cancer research, albeit in a slightly different niche.

What we are starting to see is the convergence of cancer immunotherapy with genomics, and that was very evident in the posters that are directional of where the field is going. More on that later.

This is the first of three daily blogs that summarise some of the insights and take-home messages from the EACR Cancer Genomics conference at Churchill College, Cambridge.

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Important ASCO-SITC 2017 Highlights and Trends

Orlando, Florida: It’s time for a review of emerging science and clinical concepts.  This post is the final one in our latest series from ASCO-SITC.

Here we take a step back and highlight six key emerging trends and ideas that were either presented in talks and posters, or are sentiments based on conversations with attendees in the poster halls or corridors.

Sometimes those discussions are pretty helpful in giving hints on new dirrections before the actual data eventually comes out.

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Targeting the tumour environment in Lymphomas

As we move from monotherapies to combinations in the immuno-oncology space, we start to see some intriguing ideas being explored from additional checkpoints to vaccines to neoantigens to immune agonists to oncolytic viruses. There are numerous ways to evaluate how to boost or jumpstart more immune cells upfront in the hope of seeing better efficacy.

One way to do this is to better understand the tumour microenvironment.

Wall of people at ASH16 in San Diego

If we know what’s wrong under the hood, we might be better able to make the immune system get going… more gas, faulty starter motor, dead battery, loose wire, broken fan belt? All these things and more might be a problem so you can see that diagnosing the issue up from from basic and translational work might be instructive for clinical trials.

If you don’t know what problem you’re trying to fix or repair then you might as well be throwing mud at the wall. Just as we don’t expect a car mechanic to suggest changing the battery or starter-motor without first diagnosing the issue, so understanding the tumour microenvironment in each different cancer or disease might also be a helpful strategy.

At the recent American Society of Hematology annual meeting (#ASH16), there was a fascinating sceintifc workshop that focused on this very concept – what’s going on under the hood and how do we go about fixing it?

Here we explore these ideas via an interview with a thought leader and specialist in the field. What he had to say was very interesting and candid indeed.

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How circulating tumor DNA could change cancer treatment

We’re continuing our series of posts from the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) with an expert interview on how circulating tumor DNA could change breast cancer treatment.

There has been a noticeable increase in attention and focus on the application of liquid tests – especially from blood – over the last five years, culminating in a spinoff company called Grail from the deep sequencing giant, Illumina, announcing a massive funding round earlier this month.

At the time of the BSB expert interview in San Antonio, we had no idea that the Grail news was going to hit just a couple of weeks later!

While much of the media attention surrounding Grail has focused on the early detection of cancer in apparently healthy individuals, there’s actually a much more useful application where it could be more immediately applied to great effect.

Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) or cell free DNA (cfDNA) has the potential to revolutionise and improve monitoring over time for people with cancer who are receiving therapy.

This is the third in our series of expert interviews from the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (#SABCS16).

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