News

GPOL at Festival of Genomics

Deputy Director and Head of Medical Genomics, Dr Susie Cooke will be speaking at the Festival of Genomics & Biodata in London on 29 January 2020 on Development of a Pan-cancer Genomic Assay for Use in Routine Clinical Care.

Dr Cooke will cover the development of the Glasgow Cancer Assays and how:

• Molecular pathology can influence treatment selection, patient prognosis, access to clinical trials and improve our understanding of the mechanisms of cancer resistance to chemotherapy.
• Multiplexed sequencing of biomarkers can allow a cost-effective and easily implementable diagnostic tool for public healthcare providers.

Dr Cooke recently spoke with Festival organisers about her work and motivations.

‘Sometimes in the rush to leverage the power of genomics it can feel like we’re trying to do a jigsaw without turning all the pieces the right way up first – but it’s going to be confusing and end up taking longer if we don’t standardise and rationalise what’s being done, especially in healthcare delivery.

At the moment, the clinical utility of genomic profiling for a cancer patient is limited because there aren’t that many treatment options. However, there is huge new/repurposed treatment and biomarker potential in the clinical trials space, we just need to realise that potential. Providing a broad genomic profile as standard would turn the entire cancer patient population into a trial-ready cohort for precision medicine, making drug development faster and economically viable, even for rare indications. It would be easier for patients to find trials and hence access state-of-the art therapies.

Standard-of-care treatment options would improve more rapidly and we would be able to promise every cancer patient that we would learn from them to make it less likely that their friends, their children, their siblings will have to go through the same illness. Lower drug development costs would lead to lower drug prices and more competition and any healthcare system that rolled out comprehensive genomic profiling would attract investment from companies wanting to access patients for trials. It’s win-win-win for patients, public healthcare and pharma companies in terms of both economics and patient outcomes.’

Dr Susie Cooke

The Festival of Genomics and Biodata runs for three days from 28 to 30 January 2020.