ASCO24 Updates: Paraic Kenny on Gundersen Precision Oncology Cohort

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video, Paraic Kenny, Director of the Khabarov Cancer Research Institute at Gundersen Medical Foundation, shared insights on ‘The Gundersen Precision Oncology Cohort: A biospecimen resource for mutation characterization and target discovery.‘

So I’m Paraic Kenny, I’m the director of the Khabarov Cancer Research Institute at the Gundersen Medical Foundation, which is part of Gundersen Health System in La Crosse, Wisconsin. So here at ASCO, we’re presenting our work on what we call the Gundersen Precision Oncology Cohort.

It seeks to address an outstanding unmet need in the whole arena of precision oncology, where we’ve seen so many drugs approved across a wide variety of indications targeted at one gene, often with a somewhat broad spectrum of mutations within that gene, but still a large repertoire of mutations outside of that core set, where the mechanism of action is unclear, and even the susceptibility to the particular targeted agent.

So many of the specimens that have been used in these prospective cohorts that led to the approval of these drugs are very locked down. So to try to democratize that and get some of those specimens out for use in the research community, we’ve been building up what we call the Gundersen Precision Oncology Cohort for the past couple of years. It’s now grown to a size of more than 800 patients.

We have specimens across 42 different tumor types, and these are all patients who receive comprehensive genomic profiling as part of their routine cancer care at the Gundersen Health System. We’re very big believers in the importance of understanding disease evolution on therapy, so 42 of these patients have had sampling at more than one time point. So we’ve been steadily chipping away at understanding some of these atypical variants or common variants in unusual presentations in studies in the laboratory and even in human patients that we’ve been publishing on these past few years.

But now that the cohort has grown to a size of more than 800 patients, we’re really looking for collaborators and opportunities to partner with other individuals in this precision oncology space to maximize the utilization of these specimens. We’ve had one interesting collaboration so far with a company that was developing RNA-based predictors for susceptibility to checkpoint immunotherapy and squamous cell carcinoma and have another ongoing collaboration in the sort of interface between digital pathology and artificial intelligence.

So if anybody out there is interested in exploring this further with me or my team, you can reach out to us at oncologybiobank.com. And this precision oncology cohort that I’ve mentioned is really the centerpiece of a much larger collection we have at Gundersen as part of our Gundersen Cancer Biobank, which is 114,000 specimens from 12,800 individuals.

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.