NEW YORK – The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN) has launched an adaptive clinical trial platform, called Precision Promise, that allows investigators to evaluate more than one experimental therapy at the same time.
PanCAN, a research-focused charity, has partnered with 15 clinical trial sites nationwide to enroll eligible pancreatic cancer patients in the adaptive trial. The group is working with Tempus, which will test patients for targetable molecular markers on a next-generation sequencing panel that gauges many genes. PanCAN will also facilitate follow-up biopsies to determine how a patient's tumor is responding to treatment.
Around two-thirds of pancreatic cancer patients die within the first year of their diagnosis, and only 10 percent survive for five years, which points to the need for more effective treatments.
The Precision Promise platform gives metastatic pancreatic cancer patients the opportunity to receive both first- and second-line treatments in one trial. PanCAN is hoping that an adaptive trial that allows research on multiple, molecularly informed treatments to progress at once, will make the drug development process more efficient and lead to new US Food and Drug Administration-approved personalized drugs for pancreatic cancer.
"The patients that enroll will also receive best-in-class supportive care alongside treatment with biomarker testing to better understand why treatments work in some patients but not in others," Diane Simeone, a principal investigator in Precision Promise from New York University's Langone Health, said in a statement. "This approach should serve as a model for the next generation of trials – not only for pancreatic cancer, but for all diseases."