Dialogues

Jan 15, 2025, 06:02

Fight Colorectal Cancer – Global Cancer Movement

In the inaugural event of the Global Cancer Movement, initiated by OncoDaily, Dr. Aparna Parikh sheds light on the transformative role of minimal residual disease (MRD) and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in colorectal cancer care. Held virtually from December 6-8, 2024, this event brings together experts to discuss groundbreaking advancements in oncology.

So maybe I’ll just make a couple of comments on kind of the role of MRD and ctDNA and colorectal cancer and how I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to really leverage this technology not only to potentially bring treatments earlier where we may be able to cure more patients but to really help facilitate and expedite drug development. So I’ve been working in this space for you know now around 10 years or so and I think what we have seen over the decade plus is that ctDNA has really emerged across all the tumor malignancies especially colorectal cancer is one of the most powerful prognostic biomarkers.

So with just shy of you know 100% certainty if you’re able to detect minimal residual disease on a patient’s or in a patient’s blood after curative intent therapy the cancer is going to recur.

And in the United States there’s a tremendous amount of testing that’s happening you know however really harnessing the power of that testing that is happening to generate the clinical utility data is greatly needed. So these clinical trials are very hard to do they can take a long time to identify the patients yet there remains to be a really tremendous opportunity if we can better figure out how to identify these patients at higher risk and get them onto clinical trials. And when you have such a dynamic biomarker these clinical trials potentially can really help get a fast readout.

So the lead time to recurrence to a time to event events such as recurrence is short and you have the blood based biomarker that you can actually follow dynamically. So we partnered and have now spun off a kind of non-profit called RER or reversing early recurrences which is a spin-off from Science for America that was a non-profit that Dr. Eric Lander started and really are trying to bring together cancer care organizations not only in the U.S. but globally testing companies biopharma patient advocates to really think about how we move the needle to can bring more curative therapies for colorectal cancer patients.

So thank you so much and I’m happy to answer any questions offline and my email is Aparna.Parikh at mgh.harvard.edu and kind of really, really tremendous effort that’s happening here today and really appreciate the emphasis on global access as well. Thank you.