Precision Cancer Medicine: the computational perspective in the WIN consortium
Eitan Rubin, PhD
Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Lecturer, Dept of Microbiology and Immunology
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Monday, August 8th
4:00 pm | Kiewit Auditorium
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Advancing and translating Precision Cancer Medicine (PCM) is a multi-faceted challenge. It involves deeper characterization of the tumor and the patient, creating new treatments that can benefit specific patients, or improving the way treatments are matched to patients. Translating these innovations to clinical care require, among other things, new clinical trial designs and method to validate treatment matching algorithms.
The WIN consortium was founded to address these challenges. It brings together clinicians, basic researchers, pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies, as well as patients’ advocacy groups, with a global representation. In this presentation I will broadly describe the WIN vision and discuss the main trials and research projects currently taking place, being launched, or being planned. Emphasis will be given to the computational challenges these projects pose. First and foremost, the WINTHER trial will be described in details: in this trial treatments were matched to post-last-line patients using mutations-driven or gene expression-driven algorithms. The trial design, the matching algorithms and the computational tools developed for running the trial will be discussed in depth. I will than review what we perceive as the main computational challenges for supporting WIN’s effort to improve cancer care: Better algorithms for personalized treatment matching; computational methods for evaluating decision algorithms without clinical trials; computational tools to support new clinical trial designs; and tools to promote data sharing to materialize rapid learning in precision oncology.