By: Ryan Ho
Hearing that someone you love has been stricken with cancer for the first time has got to be one of the Top 3 most heart-wrenching things you can hear. On your end, that feeling of uneasiness starts to settle in and you can’t feel any more helpless, knowing how deadly cancer can be and how uncertain the treatment process would be.
What if there was a way to introduce some relief to cancer management, with the hope that there is a possibility of precisely tailored treatment plan, with which cancer becomes a more manageable condition, rather than just a straight death sentence? This isn’t science fiction though – it’s more real than you think.
That’s the power of precision oncology. It is transforming cancer care through identifying and developing more personalized treatments for patients to improve their overall health outcomes. This is just one of many benefits presented by precision medicine, which is revolutionizing the global healthcare landscape right now.
Let’s start with some definitions. A companion diagnostic is a diagnostic test that acts as a “companion” to a therapy drug to help doctors decide if that drug is appropriate for a particular patient. As for biomarkers, they are physical, measurable indicators in the patient’s body that help doctors capture what is happening in the patient. In precision oncology, biomarkers are used to determine how well the patient is responding to a particular cancer treatment.
Let me explain 3 important ways by which companion diagnostics and biomarkers work to make cancer treatment more efficient for the various stakeholders involved: decreasing the costs of cancer drug development, optimizing selection of oncology treatments, and improving long-term Return on Investment (ROI) for Pharma and Healthcare industries.
They decrease the overall costs of cancer drug development.
Previously, cancer drug development tended to be more expensive, using the traditional “one-size-fits-all” approach that developed drugs for larger cancer patient populations, regardless of their individual characteristic differences.
As a result, it led to higher clinical trial failure rates, and also drove costs up because larger trials were required to obtain statistically significant effects in patients. Furthermore, this failure to conduct a targeted patient selection translated to a lower Probability of Success (POS) for numerous hopeful drug candidates, slowing down the overall drug development process.
Now, companion diagnostics and biomarker-driven patient selection can significantly improve the POS for clinical trials, mitigating the utter wastage of time, money, and other resources. It has been proven that the costs to bring precision oncology medicines to market can be up to $1.1 billion less than non-precision oncology medicines. The main factor that saves costs is the higher POS in clinical trials, which can account for $591.3 million of that difference.
Such savings allow healthcare resources to be utilized more efficiently, as the reduction in clinical trial failures lowers overall Research and Development (RnD) expenditure and leads to swifter drug approvals. This makes precision oncology medicines more price-friendly and accessible for patients.
They optimize the selection of treatments for cancer patients.
What’s often overlooked in traditional one-size-fits-all treatment approaches are the physical impact cancer drugs have on non-responder patients and the associated hampered clinical outcomes.
Take the lung cancer drug gefitinib, for instance. This drug’s approval was originally rescinded in 2005 as it appeared ineffective due to a lack of clinical benefit. This was caused by the fact that only a small proportion of patients in the trial responded positively to the treatment. However, its approval was later reinstated in 2015, as it was found to be an effective first-line therapy for a specific group of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.
Companion diagnostics and biomarkers solve this problem by enabling targeted cancer treatment selection. They allocate the most fitting and effective cancer therapies based on a case-by-case assessment of the individual patient’s tumor characteristics.
Studies have shown that biomarker-led drug development has only accounted for 16% of failed drug programs, while it contributed to 57% of successful drug programs. These facts highlight the immense role of biomarkers in late–stage oncology drug development successes.
Traditional cancer treatment is akin to trying to unlock a door with a gigantic bag of random keys, which ends up in unnecessary waste of resources, and in some cases further jeopardizes patient health with unintended side effects.
On the other hand, companion diagnostics provide a locksmith to carefully examine each lock, and allow choosing the exact, right key to unlock it.
They improve long-term Return on Investment (ROI) for Pharma and Healthcare industries.
Of course, all this talk cannot avoid the consideration of one of the main objectives of running a business – profits.
For Pharma companies and Healthcare systems out there, traditional cancer drug development had higher mean Research and Development costs compared to precision medicine drugs, due to the lower POS in clinical trials. It is worth noting that only 20% of oncology drugs entering clinical trials eventually obtain FDA approval, which leads to huge losses of time and money due to the high rate of late-stage clinical trial failures in traditional drug development.
These higher RnD costs manifested in lower ROI for Pharma companies, while healthcare systems dealt with rising costs as a consequence of ineffective therapies and higher rate of hospitalizations of patients with side effects and poorer outcomes.
Thankfully, precision oncology medicines paved the way for higher ROIs, as they translated to 27% more profitability compared to non-precision medicines between 1997 to 2015, when adjusted for drug launch timelines.
Not surprisingly, precision oncology keeps increasing its market share, currently accounting for 51.4% of annual sales in oncology and demonstrating ever-increasing adoption in clinical practice.
Additionally, precision medicine opens the door for Pharma companies to utilize premium pricing in niche markets by specifically tailoring their drugs to selected patient populations with increased efficacy rates.
As you already know, companion diagnostics and biomarkers in cancer treatment shift the standard of care towards precision oncology. It helps to save costs, improve patient outcomes, and even drives profitability for businesses. Sounds like a win-win to me, doesn’t it?
While challenges such as fair drug pricing and lengthy drug development processes for precision drugs still exist, the economic and humanitarian benefits of this tailored approach are worth remembering.
And have you considered that we can go even further and analyze how individual cancer cells work, with the goal of discovering even better precision oncology strategies?
Welcome to Miphic, the world’s first mitochondrial precision medicine platform that provides an unprecedented level of cancer metabolism analysis.
