Prasanth Reddy, MD, MPH, FACP, Senior Vice President and Head of Oncology at Labcorp, said, “While progress has been made to improve outcomes in cancer medicine, especially over the past two decades, current standards of care remain woefully inadequate, due in part to a lack of access and diversity in clinical trials, as well as limited access to advanced diagnostic testing.”
Patient registries are observational study methods used to collect standardized information about a group of patients who share a condition or experience. PREFER will enroll up to 2,500 patients with advanced solid-tumor cancer from multiple sites across the United States beginning September 1, 2021. OmniSeq INSIGHTsm, a comprehensive genomic and immune-profiling, tissue-based test that incorporates next-generation sequencing technology, will be used to help identify the prevalence of actionable biomarkers and driver mutations that are unique to different ethnicities.
As a part of their collaboration, Labcorp and CCORN will also create a biobank, enabling the broader oncology community to access real-world evidence and identify the source of disparities. Information from the biobank and patient registry could prove useful in improving the design of oncology clinical trials, assist in patient recruitment efforts, and help encourage the expansion of genomic profiling testing in diverse populations.
