Challenges and Opportunities of Biomarker Diagnostics in Lung Cancer

At the Great Debates & Updates in Lung Cancer meeting in New York, New York, Ignacio Wistuba, MD, discussed the challenges and opportunities associated with biomarker diagnostics among patients with lung cancer.

Transcript: 

My name is Ignacio Wistuba, I'm a surgical pathologist by training and I’m currently a Professor and Chair of Departmental Translation and Molecular Pathology in the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas and I'm happy to be here at Great Debates & Updates in Lung Cancer.

The presentation today was mostly about the challenges and opportunity of biomarker diagnostics in lung cancer, which is important, on top of having precise histology diagnosis that pathologists do for patients, to preserve tissue material for molecular and the new markers for immunotherapy that we are using. The message was how important is to actually save the material. Have workflow in your clinical practice so you can actually have the biomarker testing that includes 11 basic genomic abnormalities plus PD-L1 and immunohistochemistry in a timely fashion for a patient’s therapy. The field is changing rapidly, we have more molecular therapies available that require adopting new markers in our molecular testing that we use next generational sequencing and explain the challenges of DNA- versus RNA-based next generational sequencing and then the opportunity and challenge that we have to develop new biomarkers for immune checkpoint inhibition.

Then I touched briefly on the new challenge, which is a good opportunity for our patients, which is the biomarker for antibody drug conjugate therapy that potentially is going to be based on a protein analysis tissue by immunohistochemistry, which is going to create a lot of pressure on biomarker testing because that's going to require more tissue to be used. I explained that in the context of what is the best workflow for sample collection, sample processing, biomarker testing, and finally reporting which is a very important issue so our clinician can, from large, complex reports, see what is important for a particular patient.

Source: 

Wistuba, I. The Road from DNA to Protein: Navigating the Minefield of Expression Amplification and Mutation. Presented at Great Debates & Updates in Lung Cancer; September 21-23; New York, NY.