On Tuesday, July 12, 2016, the Georgia Center for Oncology Research and Education (CORE), hosted a dinner with leading oncologists from across the state to discuss accelerating the practice of Precision Medicine in Georgia.  Richard Schilsky, MD, FACP, FASCO, the Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) presented on the “Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry” (TAPUR).  An interactive dialogue was also held on how Georgia can accelerate evidence based best practices in Precision Medicine through clinical trials, molecular testing, targeted therapeutics, de-identified patient data sharing and molecular tumor boards.

The meeting was sponsored by Syapse, a company that drives healthcare transformation through precision medicine, enabling provider systems to improve clinical outcomes, streamline operations, and shift to new payment models. Syapse Precision Medicine Platform is a comprehensive software suite used by leading health systems to support the clinical implementation of precision medicine in oncology and other service lines. This category-defining platform enables clinical and genomic data integration, decision support, care coordination, and quality improvement at point of care. 
 

Precision Medicine is increasingly becoming an integral part of cancer care.  The National Institutes of Health define it as an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person.  On January 20, 2015, President Barack Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative® in his State of the Union address.  Through advances in research, technology and policies that enable patients, the Precision Medicine Initiative® is expected to aid in the development of individualized medical care through the partnership of researchers, clinicians and patients.  In addition, it has been announced as a major part of the “Cancer Moonshot.” Already, bipartisan legislation has been passed and new initiatives have been formed to advance and scale precision medicine approaches in clinical practice.  
 

An example of precision medicine, TAPUR, ASCO’s first-ever clinical trial, is a non-randomized clinical trial that aims to describe the performance (both safety and efficacy) of commercially available, targeted anti-cancer drugs prescribed for treatment of patients with advanced cancer that has a potentially actionable genomic variant.  The study aims to simplify patient access to approved targeted therapies that are contributed to the program by collaborating pharmaceutical companies, catalogue the choice of genomic profiling test by clinical oncologists and learn about the utility of registry data to develop hypotheses for additional clinical trials. The overall goals of TAPUR are to learn from the real world practice of prescribing targeted therapies to patients with advanced cancer whose tumor harbors a genetic variant known to be a drug target and to educate oncologists about the implementation of precision medicine in clinical practice.  Already, seventy two patients have consented to participate and thirty-seven sites are taking part.  Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Genentech, Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer have signed on as drug providers.  ASCO is using the Syapse Precision Medicine Platform to automate the study workflow, including patient registration, eligibility assessment, drug options based on genomic data and facilitation of the Molecular Tumor Board review process.  To learn more about TAPUR, go to www.TAPUR.org.
 

Georgia CORE looks forward to furthering the discussion on and encouraging the practice of Precision Medicine in Georgia.