WIN 2015: Oncologists and industry working together for personalised medicine
Prof Razelle Kurzrock - University of California, San Diego, USA
I think there are several things that are special about WIN. First, WIN has membership from multiple different countries and multiple different continents; it’s truly international. So North America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, that’s the first thing - it’s a global type of conference. The stakeholders are from multiple different avenues and that includes academics, but there are lots of conferences for academics, but here we bring in pharma, we bring in payers. This year we’re bringing in regulatory, we’re bringing in patient advocacy. So you’re talking about all the different stakeholders all together in the same place so it’s not like just an academic conference or just a pharmaceutical industry conference but all these different stakeholders coming together. In addition we have really major names in the field, people like Jim Allison who is known worldwide for his breakthroughs in immunotherapy; Richard Schilsky who is the Chief Medical Officer for ASCO; Jim Doroshow who is head of the cancer treatment branch at the National Cancer Institute. So really some of the biggest names in the field are there.
What is the importance of bringing these people together at WIN 2015?
I think that there is a real interest in bringing people together, especially in an international or global sense, to move this field forward. We know that cancer has been a devastating disease, recently there was the televised The Emperor of All Maladies. We all feel that it’s time to overthrow this Emperor of All Maladies and for the first time there’s the sense that this is possible through precision medicine or through personalised medicine but we need to bring all the stakeholders together in order to do that.
How can the field of personalised medicine move forward?
There is no way for the scientists to work by themselves and there is no way for pharma to work by themselves. So the only way to move this field forward is for the academics and the scientists, and truthfully the other stakeholders as well, the payers, the regulatory people, all to be together in the same room. If any one of those stakeholders isn’t part of the process this process is not going to go forward. When you start talking to the stakeholders and you actually have them in the same room a lot of the misconceptions disappear. It turns out that we all really are working for the same goal; we all want to see cancer treated, we all want to see cancer cured. We have a lot of misconceptions when we’re in silos but when we come into the same room we begin to understand the issues that pharma have or the issues that regulatory have and we can move forward together. There are so many other issues and challenges that we feel that we solve when we have everybody together that that’s a far greater good than the minority of issues that might need to be set aside.
How does WIN promote personalised medicine?
The whole focus of WIN is personalised medicine. So this issue, it’s been called precision medicine, it’s been called personalised medicine, it’s really both. The new therapies are very precise, they hit the tumour but not the normal tissue, and it’s personalised – everybody’s tumour is different and we have to individualise or customise therapy for each person.
How does the size of the WIN meeting benefit the delegates?
That’s one of the great things about WIN, it’s not this enormous meeting where everybody is a stranger. It’s a good size but even somebody that is not well-known yet but they have something very important, it will get out there in front of these heavyweights and people will be able to see it in a venue that might not otherwise be affordable to them in a bigger meeting.
What are some of the key issues that will be discussed?
I think there’s no question that tumour heterogeneity is a big problem and that is one of the big themes of WIN this year and that’s combination therapies. Up to now the development of targeted therapies has been with single agents, one at a time. We are very fortunate that we’ve had breakthroughs with single agents but we know we will not have long-term remissions with single agents because of tumour heterogeneity. We must have combinations of targeted therapies that are matched to patients or immunotherapies. That’s the whole theme of WIN this year directed at heterogeneity. I think this field is moving extremely fast and the technology is moving at a startling rate. There are new drugs that are coming on board very quickly and new study designs that are rapidly being developed. That’s what WIN is really about, bringing some of the best people together to talk about some of these new findings and to create clinical trials that address them.
Immunotherapy is a great example of personalised therapy. The immune system is very precise and it’s very personalised when we try to fortify a person’s immune system to attack their tumour, not somebody else’s tumour. As I mentioned before, Jim Allison, one of the fathers and best known people of immunotherapy, will be at the symposium and will be speaking there. So this is going to be a crucial part of the future of personalised therapy.
What is the overall strategy of the WIN Consortium?
The overall strategy of the WIN Consortium is to bring people together from all over the globe, all different types of stakeholders to implement personalised medicine in such a way that it transforms cancer care and ultimately we want to impact the survival of cancer patients.
Does multidisciplinarity factor into the WIN Consortium’s agenda?
We talked a lot in the past about targeted therapy and genomic therapy, now we’re talking about combining genomically driven therapy and immunotherapy. That’s one of the focusses of one of the new trials that we’re doing, bringing these two new modalities together into one trial.
Could you discuss what is happening with the WINTHER trial?
WINTHER is the founding trial of the WIN Consortium, it’s the first trial that we’ve done. It’s really a pretty amazing trial. First of all it has involved six major centres in five countries; second, it includes both genomics and transcriptomics, which is the RNA. I’m not going to say that there are no other trials but there are no other trials worldwide that I know of that incorporate both advanced technologies and is already running. There’s already 200 some patients that have been involved there and it’s actually amazing, we have a clinical management committee that does teleconferences every Monday morning and we have investigators from our sites all over the world talking about patients and helping to make decisions based on these advanced techniques, advanced genomics and advanced transcriptomics, for these patients. So it’s really an amazing, cutting edge trial. We’re already seeing responses, these are patients that are refractory to treatment so by matching them by this very sophisticated technology we’re already seeing responses. We still haven’t analysed the trial yet in total because it’s not finished yet but this is clearly the way of the future. Most institutions have begun to do genomics but going the next step, integrating transcriptomics or RNA in addition to genomics, I don’t know that anybody else has gotten that far. So this is really a trial that is completely cutting edge and that’s what we want to be doing, some of the best trials, really, across the world.
Who would you encourage to join the WIN Consortium?
We want institutions that are major players in the cancer field, that are innovative, that want to be at the cutting edge, that want to work internationally and that want to interact with all the major stakeholders to change cancer medicine.
What would you say to someone interested in the WIN Consortium?
I think anyone who is interested in the cutting edge of what is happening in cancer and what’s happening in personalised medicine and wants to be involved in moving this field forward at the most rapid rate possible would be interested in WIN and the strategy of WIN.
