Transcript: Transforming clinical research with the NCI Director
ASCO 2024: A high-level overview
Dr Ben Gallarda
All transcripts are created from interview footage and directly reflect the content of the interview at the time. The content is that of the speaker and is not adjusted by Medthority.
A final presentation by Dr. Kimryn Rathmell, the director of the National Cancer Institute of the the US National Institutes of Health, talked about going further, faster, and transforming clinical trials.
Dr. Rathmell talked about trials and successes as was emphasised by many of the other speakers, but she also pointed out that the faster we can get trials going and the faster we can get trial readouts, the better new options might come to patient care. She mentioned two initiatives of the NCI.
The first is the Clinical Trials Innovation Unit. This group is looking at innovating clinical trial design, management, accrual, everything about a clinical trial. How can that be made faster and better? And an initial pragmatic lung cancer trial launched by this unit has seen incredibly fast accrual of patients over the last several months and it is already having patients into the trial care and producing results that ideally will be analysed and understood even faster than normal trials.
The second point she emphasised was a virtual clinical trials office. And this virtual clinical trials office is meant to address staff shortages across the nation related to clinical trial support, be it specialist care nurses, clinical trial associates or even data analysts, the NCI's Virtual Clinical Trials Office is able to provide that additional support anywhere in the country, allowing clinical trials to speed up and be accomplished, not bogged down by a lack of staff. She finally talked about optimising data. And for this, the NCI is partnering with other US government offices, such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health and the Department of Energy.
ASCO, in previous years, has launched the mCODE Data Standardisation initiative. And Dr. Rathmell emphasised that these data optimization efforts are going a long way to standardise data and make data more accessible, and perhaps explored better by large language, by artificial intelligence initiative, as well. And, finally, in response to a question, Dr. Rathmell talked about international collaboration, and while ASCO is an American Association and the National Cancer Institute is within the US Department of Health, both have an international remit, both supporting international researchers to come to the United States and conduct their research and also funding trials all over the world.
So, from Dr. Rathmell's perspective, this kind of global effort is going to be required in order to continue to see improvements in patient outcomes, cancer care, and support the needs of everyone dealing with a cancer diagnosis.