Pam Mangat Explains How ASCO Works to Educate Oncologists on Precision Medicine

Pam Mangat, MS, associate director TAPUR study at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), says that the organization has developed a number of initiatives to educate oncology practitioners on the potential of precision medicine, such as testing guidelines, online courses, a virtual tumor board, and clinical trials.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How is ASCO working to educate oncology practitioners on the potential of precision medicine?

So ASCO has done this via a few different mechanisms. One is that we’ve developed guidelines on testing, such as RAST testing, extended RAST testing, HER2, and EGFR testing. Another initiative we’ve undertook is providing some courses on ASCO University, which is a comprehensive e-learning center. Right now we have 2 courses available, one for cancer genetics and one for tumor genomics. The cancer genetics course focuses on the germline mutations and how to interpret them. And the tumor genomics course focuses on somatic mutations and how to understand them.

Another future of ASCO University is, I think in January 2015, we started an online virtual molecular tumor board, and this is available to all of our members, where a live case is posted. It’s available for 2 weeks where anyone can come, they can post their interpretation and recommendations for the case. And then after about 2 weeks, a medical oncologist and a molecular pathologist will provide their official analysis of the case and their co-recommendations, and this is available to everyone for viewing.

And lastly, we have ASCO’s first clinical trial, the TAPUR Study, the Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry Study, or TAPUR for short, which is ASCO’s first clinical trial. It’s a precision medicine trial, it’s a non-randomized Phase II prospective clinical trial where we hope to learn about targeted therapies for genomic aberrations identified on our participants’ genomic test result report.