Martine Piccart, MD, PhD: What Is Needed From Patients To Help Facilitate the Research Process
Dr. Martine Piccart, the current president of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), talks about the data-sharing database of breast cancer trial information that ESMO in currently building and what is needed from patients to help continue the momentum.
Dr. Piccart is Professor of Oncology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and Director of the Medicine Department at the Institut Jules Bordet, in Brussels, Belgium.
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The Group Room at the 34th Annual CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium was made possible by support from:
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Selma Schimmel, Founder & CEO, Vital Options International:
Hello and welcome to the Group Room where we’re at the 34th Annual CTRC – AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. We are now joined by Professor-Doctor Martine Piccart who is the Director of Medicine at the Institute of Jules Bordet, she is Professor of Oncology at the Free University of Brussels, and also the incoming president of the European Society of Medical Oncology known as ESMO.
Let’s talk about what patients need to understand in regards to research and the need for researchers to get feedback from clinicians in order to really be able to develop personalized treatments. What do you need from patients to help facilitate the research process, in addition to enrolling in clinical trials, which more patients I believe in Europe are participating in trials than here in the United States?
Martine Piccart, MD, PhD, Professor of Oncology, Universite Libre de Bruxelles:
I think for patients what is important to know is that we have never seen so much progress of curing, understanding of what makes a difference between a cancer cell and a normal cell. So our understanding of the biology of the disease has improved tremendously but also the technologies that we can use to get further understanding of why some patients do well with a certain treatment and why others don’t respond. So we are in this exciting time where everything is there to make a lot of progress. But for that we need to establish really strong collaborations between clinicians and patients. And when I hear the term ‘personalized medicine’ I get sometimes very upset because I don’t think we are there yet. I think it’s a little bit of a lie, and it’s dangerous because people think we’re getting there and we’re not getting there. So it’s really going to require a massive effort in the next decade.
So I think patients will like to hear that we are doing progress right now, but it’s clearly important also for them to understand that the way we practice oncology is still very empirical so that we really need to get a tissue to understand what’s going on, and that’s the only way we are going to progress. So that’s clearly important message from them. Another important message that I would like to convey is that this research in biomarkers – features of the cancers that can tell us indeed whether a tumor is going to be sensitive or not sensitive to a treatment – has been very disappointing, and I think we need a dramatic change in the way we conduct this research and I strongly support the notion that we need to integrate all the results of all the clinical trials into databases and make these databases completely open to researchers.
If patients could help us pushing the idea, at least the results, that you get out of the analysis of the specimens should be made accessible after a certain period of time, and everybody should have a possibility to examine this and perhaps make some discoveries. So we are currently building a data sharing platform for breast cancer trials with the idea that we can perhaps convince pharmaceutical companies for example, to let us give access to the data collected in the standard treatment because already there we could learn a lot. Patients getting the standard treatment of today, sometimes do well sometimes do very poorly and we would of course protect the investigation or treatment arm for a few years but already that would be such a huge progress in terms of accelerating the understanding of why a patient responds or doesn’t respond to a treatment.
Selma Schimmel:
What happens with the exchange of tissue with the research process between the US and Europe?
Martine Piccart, MD, PhD:
That’s a very good question. Well, it’s going very smoothly. We are starting a huge global trial for women with Her2-Positive breast cancer where we mandate a collection of tumor blocks to centrally review whether they are really having this particular subtype of breast cancer called Her2-Positive. And the central review will take place in Milan, Europe and blocks from the US from Asia, from everywhere, we come to Milan we analyze there and returned to the hospitals. And this has been accepted, it has been a little difficult in US but finally most hospitals and oncologists have agreed to collaborate, which is really great.
Selma Schimmel:
I’m very excited for the time I spent with you. Truly I have had the pleasure of observing your work and seeing what you do over the last decade, and you’re very inspirational woman and doctor. Professor-Doctor Martine Piccart, Professor of Oncology at the Free University of Brussels, the Director of Medicine at the Institute of Jules Bordet and the incoming president of the European Society of Medical Oncology, ESMO. Thank you very, very much, Professor Piccart.
Martine Piccart, MD, PhD:
Thank you.
END OF VIDEO