Dr Michael Thompson on Conducting Precision Medicine Trials in the Community Setting

Michael Thompson, MD, PhD, FASCO, Aurora Advanced Healthcare, discusses challenges associated with conducting precision medicine trials in the community setting.

Transcript

What challenges are associated with conducting precision medicine trials in the community setting?

So, with precision medicine, you need to have tissue, and if you need new tissue, that is sometimes a barrier based on location or cost and toxicity of getting the new tissue. There is a barrier of getting the testing done, whether that’s on a research study or before the research program actually and the eligibility criteria, which may limit patient accrual. For many of these patients that have been through multiple lines of therapy and there aren’t a lot of great options, anything that slows things down can cause them to go from relatively healthy and able to go on a trial, to unhealthy and unable to go on the trial, or even dying. So, this has been seen, and we have to do things efficiently and fast in order to overcome these accrual barriers.