Syapse, Roche Team Up to Advance Precision Medicine in Oncology

Syapse, a leading precision medicine company, and Roche have joined forces to advance precision medicine in oncology.

The 2 will collaborate to develop software products and analytics solutions that empower healthcare providers with the tools and insights they need to practice precision medicine at scale, with the goal of improving patient outcomes and health-related quality of life, according to a press release from Syapse.

Currently, one of the biggest challenges for community health systems practicing precision oncology is ensuring consistency in care delivery, and that challenge stems from several causes, said Ken Tarkoff, CEO, Syapse, in an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care^® (AJMC^®).

First, these health systems need access to real-time data. According to Tarkoff, giving oncologists the most up-to-date information when they need it has been an obstacle. If a patient comes into a practice with a more advanced or rare type of cancer, giving the oncologist the ability to see data on similar patients, their treatments, and their outcomes in a real-time fashion would allow that oncologist to go beyond just his or her own experience.

In addition, many therapies have several administrative steps, including financial assistance: “Many of these therapies have a large patient portion and the patient is often eligible for programs that can help with financial assistance and the burden,” said Tarkoff. “The burden on the practice to do the work to see if a patient is eligible is significant and often times what they need is data that is already available to them, but it’s not readily available to be populated into those application processes.”

Working to eradicate these challenges and make precision medicine a reality for more providers and their patients, the pair will initially set its focus on 4 pillars:

• Precision medicine insights: realize the vision of a “learning health system” by empowering physicians to make better care decisions using real-world evidence, including insights from clinical, molecular, treatment, and outcomes.
• Evidence for precision medicine: bring cancer care into the “value-based” era by enabling health systems and payers to understand the health economics and outcomes impact of precision medicine cancer care.
• Electronic patient-reported outcomes: measure and understand the effect of precision medicine on health-related quality of life, and assist care teams in managing the impact of targeted therapies and immunotherapies.
• Clinical trials recruitment optimization: accelerate clinical trials by matching to precision medicine trials at the point of care.

“One of the things we’re going to emphasize that’s important is: we believe very strongly that the way to ultimately improve cancer outcomes and cancer care is to start with the provider and build an effective network ecosystem to enable them to deliver better care, which ultimately benefits the patient,” said Tarkoff.

Precision medicine is increasingly being introduced and implemented in practices, transforming the one-size-fits-all approach to an approach tailored to each patient. With the help of software, practices can transfer data from different testing companies or labs to their electronic health records, have data readily retrievable in the long term and easily matched to specific clinical trials, and compare results with other patients with the same molecular profile.

According to an article in AJMC^®’s supplement Exploring the Evolving Landscape of Precision Medicine, the emergence of precision medicine is particularly important in oncology, as it requires an in-depth understanding of the tumor biology of each patient. In recent decades, researchers have been able to identify molecular patterns and targets valuable to determining the prognosis of a given cancer, determining the appropriate treatments, and designing targeted therapies for specific mutations.