oncology Archives - Page 4 of 4 - Medical Design Sourcing

Why the pandemic is forcing oncology clinical trials to evolve

Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels

COVID-19 has complicated oncology trials and oncology care in general, slowing down the success seen against cancer.

The cancer death rate fell 29% between 1991 and 2017, according to the American Cancer Society. Novel treatments such as immunotherapy helped, but the coronavirus pandemic has created challenges.

Researchers have had to adapt and innovate, with AI playing an important role.

COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on oncology

“Cancer patients have been disproportionately negatively affected by COVID-19,” said Jeff Elton, CEO of ConcertAI, an AI company specializing in oncology. Immunocompromised patients with hematological malignancies such as multiple myeloma, in particular, face outsized risks from COVID-19 infection.

To reduce the risk for patients, many oncology clinics in 2019 limited capacity while making significant treatment chang…

Investigational drug promises to reverse wasting syndrome in cancer patients

Endevica Bio (formerly TCI Peptide Therapeutics) was founded in 2009 with a focus on peptides that affect the melanocortin system, which mammals use to regulate food intake and energy homeostasis. The company’s core focus is on a drug candidate known as TCMCB07, which is a potential treatment for cachexia in cancer patients. Cachexia, a wasting disorder that can result in significant weight loss, is common in patients with advanced cancers, AIDS and kidney failure.

Endevica Bio anticipates that clinical trials for TCMCB07 will begin in the fourth quarter of 2021.

To learn more about the company and its TCMCB07 candidate, we spoke with the company’s chief commercial officer, LeAnn Kuhlmann Qi. In the following interview, Kuhlmann Qi provides an overview of cachexia and the potential to reverse the condition and explains why a dog model of disease can be considerably more useful than a rodent model.

Drug Discovery &a…

4D Path and University of Leeds extend partnership to validate oncology platform

The precision oncology company 4D Path has committed to partnering with the U.K.-based University of Leeds at least until 2027. The two entities are already collaborators, having worked together on three completed breast cancer clinical trials. In particular, researchers at the University of Leeds have used 4D Path’s Q-plasia OncoReader Breast software to analyze data from more than 1,000 patients over the past three years. 4D Path says its technology can help in various levels in clinical trials starting from patient recruitment for therapy eligibility, which can be challenging for rare mutations, to designing trials for therapy benefit and potentially suggesting drug target screens. The company's technology supports biomarker profiling and stratification from hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) whole slide biopsy and resection images. The platform can help researchers identify the cancer subtype, grade, presence of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) and horm…

Are predictive diagnostics the Doppler radar of disease?

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

What do cupcakes have to do with oncology, and more specifically, predictive diagnostics?

Before I explain, I’ll provide some context. I recently came across an image that illustrated the difference between how Doppler radar detects conditions for a Tornado Watch versus a Tornado Warning using cupcakes.1 One side of the graphic shows each of the ingredients measured in individual containers. This visual represents when you have everything you need to make a cupcake; in weather terms, the conditions are favorable for a cupcake. A cupcake watch could be declared, but no fully-baked, devourable cupcake is visible yet. On the other side of the image, once the ingredients are assembled and baked, it’s much clearer that we have an actual cupcake on our hands and, therefore, a warning would be in place. For meteorologists, this is when Doppler radar has detected a full tornado, com…