Nikki Martin, Senior Director, Precision Medicine Initiatives at LUNGevity Foundation shared a post by Huzaifah Salat, Inaugural Regional Medical Director of Respiratory Care for Metro Milwaukee (Org 100) Hospitals at Advocate Health, shared a post on LinkedIn, adding:
“LUNGevity Foundation just kicked off a Tissue Acquisition and PreAnalytics Working Group to identify and share best practices in tissue acquisition and point-of-care pre-analytics for lung cancer biomarker testing.
There are plenty of guidelines for tissue biopsy, but implementation and enforcement of guideline recommendations is lacking.
As was raised by Alda Tam at the kick off, we need to be exploring approaches for success and mapping barriers specific to the community practices where the majority of lung cancer patients are treated, and guidelines are often not written with those settings in mind.
I’m looking forward to this work and making a difference in increasing discussion on this essential topic.”
Quoting Huzaifah Salat‘s post:
There is no precision medicine in lung cancer without a precise biopsy.
– Dr. Huzaifah Salat.
Did I just quote myself? Yes. And I stand by it. We’ve moved far beyond the days when medical oncology alone carried the weight of precision medicine in lung cancer. Pulmonologists now play a crucial role in the lung cancer care pathway.
Every week, it seems, a new biomarker-driven therapy is approved. But there’s a gap no one is talking about enough.
We still face:
– Inconsistent tissue acquisition.
– Variability in biopsy quality.
– Gaps in education around biomarker testing.
– Unreliable and often delayed NGS testing.
– Few centers offering reflex testing.
A lung cancer patients care should not be dictated by their ZIP Code.
Precision medicine starts long before treatment decisions. It starts at diagnosis.
With studies like VERITAS and RELIANT highlighting robotic bronchoscopy as a potential gold standard for diagnosing lung nodules and mediastinal disease, the conversation is shifting.
But the real question for MedTech, precision medicine companies as well as health care leaders is: Are we going to invest in precision medicine upstream Or continue to just react and complain downstream?”
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