The VA’s New England Healthcare System https://www.newengland.va.gov and the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center have instituted the “Precision Oncology Program” (POP) to help veterans with newly diagnosed non-small cell lung cancer.
When veterans are diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer, VA physicians take a specimen of their tumor and then send it to laboratories for targeted genomic sequencing. This process determines the DNA sequence of genes that are considered important to understand when treating lung cancer.
The sequencing identifies specific mutations or changes that are causing the lung cancer to grow allowing the patient to benefit from drugs that are targeted to those mutations and then to make it possible for the patient to take part in clinical trials.
The program available at the VA’s New England Health System (VISN 1) is now available at all VA facilities nationwide. Plus, this program is scheduled to receive funding from the VA’s Cooperative Studies Program to begin precision oncology trials.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) https://www.cancer.gov is also partnering with the VA to accelerate trial enrollment in their NCI clinical trials. This effort called “NAVIGATE” is offering veterans diagnosed with cancer increased access to state-of-the-art care by participating in NCI supported clinical trials. NCI is providing funding for up to ten VA medical facilities to directly enroll patients in NCI supported trials.
Also, the VA and IBM Watson Health https://www.ibm.com/watson/health have formed a public private partnership to apply artificial intelligence to help interpret cancer data when treating veteran patients. VA’s precision oncology program primarily supports Stage 4 cancer patients who have exhausted other treatment options.
The partnership extension will enable VA oncologists to continue using Watson for Genomics through at least June 2019. The VA treats the largest group of cancer patients within any one healthcare group. In order to bring precision oncology advances to this large group of patients with equal access available anywhere in the country, the VA has established a central “hub” in Durham North Carolina.
In this facility, a small group of oncologists and pathologists receive tumor samples from patients nationwide and sequence the tumor DNA. Then they use artificial intelligence to help interpret the genomic data and then identify relevant mutations and potential therapeutic options to target the mutations.