Through these enhancements, Caris Molecular Intelligence will now provide oncologists even more potentially useful treatment information for some of the most challenging cancers, including ovarian, head and neck, sarcoma, melanoma and non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC).
Caris Molecular Intelligence now offers a number of protein targets, including PD-1, a protein expressed by the immune cells (e.g.,T cells) that can help cancerous cells evade the immune system.
A number of pharmaceutical companies have promising lead drugs targeting PD-1 in current clinical trials for melanoma, such as immunotherapies like nivolumab and lambrolizumab.
These drugs block the PD-1 protein and help the immune system recognize and attack the melanoma cells. PD-1, along with its ligand PD-L1 (now also offered at Caris), both have shown great promise in clinical trials for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) as well.
"Caris is committed to providing maximum clinical utility to the physicians and patients who rely on it," said Sandeep K. Reddy, M.D., Clinical Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Senior Medical Director at Caris Life Sciences.
"With these new enhancements, Caris helps to connect patients battling some of the deadliest tumors with up to 51 drug associations and also groundbreaking clinical studies for immunologically-based drug trials."
The addition of certain key markers to Caris Molecular Intelligence will continue to enhance the service’s existing clinical utility by expanding the associations to platinum-based therapies such as cisplatin, carboplatin and oxaliplatin.
These therapies are commonly prescribed in ovarian cancer, sarcomas and other challenging tumor types.
Expanding Caris Molecular Intelligence’s biomarker associations to the platinum drug class is critically important for treating oncologists seeking additional evidence-guided therapy options.
"The majority of newly-added markers to Caris Molecular Intelligence are proteins, which cannot be assessed through DNA sequencing, but only analyzed via Immunohistochemistry (IHC)," said David D. Halbert, Chairman and CEO of Caris Life Sciences.
"Our service, which already identified the largest number of relevant FDA-approved drug associations in the industry today, has now further established itself as the leader in clinical usefulness, offering patients 51 total FDA-approved drug associations as potential treatment options, as opposed to the 19 that can be found through the use of Next-Generation Sequencing alone."
Caris Molecular Intelligence’s Clinical Trials Connector has also been substantially upgraded, including a real-time feed from www.clinicaltrials.gov that is updated nightly.
The Clinical Trials Connector will also now only display results from open and enrolling trials to improve accuracy and efficiency, as well as include more nuanced filtering abilities, such as side-by-side trial comparison.
The service will feature trial matching based on age, gender, tumor type, and biomarker expression level, with trial results formatted as direct links to the trial enrollment site to ensure easy and convenient enrollment.
Other enhancements to the Physician Portal have also been made to streamline the test ordering process for oncologists. Physicians and their staff will now be able to approve testing and order additional tests via e-mail.
These changes will help make the process efficient and simple to navigate for busy oncology offices.