Jia Jenny Liu, Translational Lead of Early Phase Drug Development at The Kinghorn Cancer Centre, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“The most important take-away from the 2026 NECTA meeting wasn’t a new therapy. The bottleneck in oncology drug development is no longer molecule discovery. It’s execution.
We have highly active agents, complex trial designs integrating PK/PD, dose optimisation, ctDNA, and PROs as emerging endpoints, with early-phase trials increasingly functioning as therapeutic options.
But the system delivering them hasn’t kept pace. Patients are lost not because we lack drugs; because referral happens too late, trial awareness is fragmented, and sites operate in silos. Meanwhile, dose optimisation, nuanced toxicity management, and tumour-agnostic approaches are stretching a workforce and a system never designed for this level of coordination…
Trial delivery needs to become a coordinated system, not a collection of sites. That means cross-referral, real-time trial visibility, and shared responsibility for navigation across public, private, and academic centres, with sponsors and consumer advocates.
Networked models like NSW Early Clinical Trials Alliance (NECTA) point the way. Partnership isn’t optional. It’s the only architecture that works.
Congratulations to NECTA on 10 years and thank you to the speakers Timothy Yap, Cook Natalie, Yuxiang Ma, Aaron Hansen, Ben Tran and many others who made it such a rich day.
If the last decade was about building better drugs, the next decade will be defined by how well we deliver them.”
Other articles featuring Jia Jenny Liu on OncoDaily.
