10 Steps to ‘End Cancer As We Know It’ - Blue Ribbon Panel's 10 Recommendations (U.S.)

Oncology Times
 

Blue Ribbon Panel's 10 Recommendations

1. Engage patients to contribute their comprehensive tumor profile data to expand knowledge about what therapies work, in whom, and in which types of cancer. This recommendation would create a privacy-protected new national network in which patients could “pre-register” for clinical trials.

2. Establish a cancer immunotherapy clinical trials network devoted exclusively to discovering and evaluating immunotherapy approaches in oncology. This network could help to speed the development of new cancer vaccines.

3. Identify therapeutic targets to overcome drug resistance through studies that determine the mechanisms that lead cancer cells to become resistant to previously effective treatments.

4. Create a national ecosystem for sharing and analyzing cancer data so that researchers, clinicians, and patients will be able to contribute data, which will facilitate efficient data analysis. This ecosystem would link many of the largest U.S. data repositories.

5. Improve our understanding of fusion oncoproteins (so-called rogue proteins) in pediatric cancer and use new preclinical models to develop inhibitors that target them.

6. Accelerate the development of guidelines for routing monitoring and management of patient-reported symptoms to minimize debilitating side effects of cancer and its treatment.

7. Reduce cancer risk and cancer health disparities through approaches in development, testing and broad adoption of proven prevention strategies. These include tobacco control, colorectal cancer screening and HPV vaccination.

8. Predict response to standard treatments through retrospective analysis of patient specimens.

9. Create dynamic 3D maps of human tumor evolution to document the genetic lesions and cellular interactions of each tumor as it evolves from a precancerous lesion to advanced cancer. A 3-D cancer atlas would allow researchers to develop predictive models of tumor progression and response to treatment.

10. Develop new enabling cancer technologies to characterize tumors and test therapies. These include implantable microdosing drug devices and advanced imaging technologies to study cancers at extremely high resolution.