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Dr. Jack West is a medical oncologist and thoracic oncology specialist, and Executive Director of Employer Services at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, CA.
This is the last of six podcasts produced from the two hour program we did in partnership with the LUNGevity Foundation earlier this year in Santa Monica, at the start of the "Targeted Therapies in Lung Cancer" annual meeting. This activity was comprised of some great panel discussions and brief presentations on tough but timely issues on the subject of "Molecular Markers in Advanced NSCLC: Who to Test and What to Test For?". It featured guest faculty members Dr. Charlie Rudin from Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Alice Shaw from Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. David Spigel from Sarah Cannon Cancer Center, and Dr. Glen Goss from the University of Ottawa.
In this last installment, Dr. Goss speaks on the topic of how to broaden the incorporation of molecular marker studies in lung cancer beyond specialty academic centers and try to implement them in wider networks. He discusses the early pilot efforts as well as the challenges, particular cost issues, but raises the possibility that smarter treatment could also prove to be more cost-effective, even adding the cost of more and better molecular diagnostic studies.
We follow his presentations with some final meaty questions about the panels views on what role physicians should play in considering costs of health care recommendations, whether we should be doing "reflex testing" automatically for all patients with advanced NSCLC (or a defined subset), and whether there's a clear role and incentive for repeat biopsies over the course of ongoing treatment.
Here are the audio and video versions of the podcast, along with transcript and figures.
Molecular Markers SM Pt 6 Goss on Markers in HC Systems Audio Podcast
Molecular Markers SM Pt 6 Goss on Markers in HC Systems Transcript
Molecular Markers SM Pt 6 Goss on Markers in HC Systems Figs
Our next podcasts will cover presentations by Drs. Ramaswamy Govindan and Julie Brahmer on Immunotherapies for Lung Cancer. There should be some news on this front from ASCO, particularly on anti-PD1 as a mechanism, so we'll work to get that content out around the time we're discussing the new information being presented at ASCO.
Please feel free to offer comments and raise questions in our
discussion forums.
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