Marie Lamont Highlights Inteliquet's Determined Efforts Through the COVID-19 Landscape

Marie Lemont, Inteliquet CEO, discusses the ongoing efforts made by Inteliquet, an Oncology focused software company for clinical trial patient matching, as experts continue to navigate the COVID-19 landscape.

Transcript

My name is Marie Lamont, and I am the head of Inteliquet, a software company for clinical trial patient matching focused on oncology, or cancer patients.

Let's talk a little bit about the landscape, especially COVID-related landscape. COVID-19 stalled, delayed, or canceled as many as 60% of the clinical trials for cancer drugs and biological therapies in the United States. This is something that was published by The Lancet.

Transparamed reported that more than 1,200 clinical trials worldwide ended because of the pandemic. Interestingly enough, since then, global data found that less than 45% of oncology trials resumed since the pandemic started.

I think it is RDP Clinical Outsourcing, earlier this year, April or May time frame, called out 70% of trials are still experiencing startup delays with nearly 80% of trials failing to meet on-time enrollment.

What does this mean? The postponement of cancer center screenings are suggesting a spike for later diagnosis. I am going to pause for a minute and say we know that the Delta variant and the potential for the Lambda variant coming further north is going to be an issue.

Right now, I am seeing and hearing from some cancer centers that they are already slowing down enrollment again. They are already delaying patient visits.

Some of that is because you are dealing with the most immune-compromised patients and some of it is we have seen folks who have been vaccinated who are actually coming down with COVID, and we do not want to put cancer center patients at risk.

I think what we saw last year is a lot of delays in trials and stoppage in trials. Now we are seeing something similar, and we are just at the tip of that right now. It will be super important to watch what happens throughout September, October, and November.

Why do I say that? Because we are talking about patients slowing down therapies, we are talking about patient visits for clinical trials slowing down, which means the progress of these novel therapeutics is being slowed down.

Back to my topic that I said earlier, the postponement of cancer screenings. By postponing screenings, we are pushing diagnosis later. It does not mean every screening is a cancer patient. What screenings do is they allow earlier identification of cancer or cancer risk. We are worried that there is a surge of patients coming.

A JAMA research letter showed that delayed doctor's visits slowed down the weekly new diagnosis rates for 6 common cancers, including breast cancer. If we start to see a delay again this fall for screenings, I am worried that we are pushing people even further.

A CDC study in early July showed many women skipped breast and cervical cancer screenings in the early days of the pandemic. It was an 87% drop in cervical cancer screenings in April 2020 as compared to the prior year, 5-year averages.

This really means we are pushing people further down in their diagnosis, which means we are starting therapeutics and treatment later in that cancer cycle.

That worries me broadly, both as a family member, as a parent, as a leader of an organization, and just a global citizen. What will happen to cancer patients, especially those patients who normally might not have been diagnosed until stage 4?

We're pushing patients further along the cycle. I think I and many others are advocating for how can we come up with better ways of doing home screenings. That happens to be one thing that folks can look at.

When I think about what happened with trials and what's happening, restarting trials is a pressure test for technologies whose proponents suggest that they can help, and that includes me, too.

Researchers and providers are going to gravitate to solutions that are going to produce fewer clicks and deliver a greater value, which improves them spending more time with their patients, that uses less of their precious time and focus. These screenings would have caught many cancers earlier.

This is going to be a test for care when you already take existing, challenging clinical research and clinical care, and you're shifting everything downstream. It really will test our systems.

Many cancer patients receive their care in community cancer settings. How do we help all cancer centers as well as community cancer centers to find better tools to bring research into care? A lot of us talk about cancer as a care option or clinical trials as a care option.

1% of community patients get care in the community setting. Around 5%, broadly speaking, cancer patients get into trials all along, and we need to fix that dichotomy, because if there isn't a targeted therapeutic that's FDA approved, there may be a targeted therapeutic precision medicine for that patient in a trial.

I'd like to see us giving patients the hope that they need for the best treatment for them. When I think about talking to healthcare orgs, research directors, community cancer centers, how do we help them do their job better?

How do we help them treat patients and offer even trials better? How do we help them so they don't have to choose advancing clinical research versus giving patients access to any type of therapeutic?

I think technology similar to what Inteliquet offers, as well as others, can help by giving them some of the most advanced technology to give them the most advanced science and trials to the patients who will benefit. In doing so, we help reduce their administrative burden, and we help them give better choices to the patients.

I think that you can develop better ways to discover potential new therapies in the lab. Physicians may have insight based on clinical practice and experience.

You can develop better ways of analyzing data, but until clinical research directors at cancer centers across the United States can bring trial options to patients without being told they're harming the budget and the revenue of a site, there's going to be challenging headwinds.

Real-world data and synthetic control arms can be beyond useful, but you need really good data. You need longitudinal data, and you need treating physicians to have access to that all. A lot of cancer centers rely on patient reimbursement to stay afloat.

It is a smart data-driven approach, but if they are relying on reimbursement, and they are not being reimbursed because trials are delayed and screenings are delayed, you are talking about them getting a financial squeeze the exact same people who need to care for these patients whose disease has progressed.

Folks like us look at manual screening efforts that are currently underway to match patients to trials, and we and others offer solutions to automate that. Anything to reduce that administrative burden for cancer centers, they can spend the time with the patients instead of crawling through their charts to find patients that match to a trial.

I think folks like us try to make sure we do the hard work to make it simpler and easier for cancer centers and researchers to match those patients to trials, evaluate feasibility, anything that will save their time and effort from an administrative burden.

A great example would be feasibility questionnaires. We see cancer centers filling these out to be matched to a trial with a sponsor. They can take up to 24 hours a week.

One cancer center was doing about 260 feasibility questionnaires a year. It would take them about 780 staff hours. That is time away from patients, time away from patient-focusing activity.

By implementing some automated tools, they can decrease the time to 5-10 minutes per feasibility questionnaire. It is super material for them, and so I encourage the industry to look for ways to align economic growth and the success of cancer centers and their ability to serve patients with better access to trials.

Let's look at tech. Let's look at ways to do home testing, especially in the space where we are pushing out screenings. Let's look for ways to meet patients where they are instead of having to bring patients into centers if we are going to be putting patients at risk.

That is my recommendation, and those are some of my observations. I hope that is helpful for you all.