Cancer Clinical Trials
A Match Rate Analysis
Regis University | Masters in Data Science | Practicum 1
About
Cancer Today
Cancer is a genetic disease that occurs due to changes in your genes which control how your cells function, grow, and divide. There can be many types of DNA changes that can cause cancer, one that most are familiar with is BRCA1 and BRCA2, which is associated with breast cancer. When it comes to cancer, patients are treated based on the type of cancer developed and how advanced it is. According to the National Cancer Institute the standard of care treatments include surgery with chemotherapy and/or radiation, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, or hormone therapy.
However, there is another option, and that is to try a clinical trial. Clinical trials enable physicians to find new ways to treat, diagnose, and prevent cancer. This can benefit the patient by not having to go through harsh therapies such as chemo, and if successful can help pave the way for more patients to get this same drug. Clinical trials are only conducted after all the research is done in the lab, which takes years to understand on cancer cells tested in labs and on animals. The final step is testing humans, which makes the process safer.
Clinical trials are vital, because it enables to people live longer, happier lives while having cancer. The crucial part of these studies is that they look at the change in the DNA and target that, as oppose to chemo where you’re killing both the bad and the good. If more trials become successful, we have the potential of changing the standard of care to targeting cancer at its core. Clinical trials are the key to making progress against cancer.
The Problem
Where my research begins...
You might be wondering why more patients are not participating in clinical trials? There are a few reasons. One being that clinical trials have very specific inclusion/exclusion criteria that are based on things such as gene mutation, prior drug therapies, age, etc. Additionally, most trials are for those in advanced and metastatic stages of cancer, which means patients are at the end of the line of options and may be too sick to start a trial. Besides these factors, location of the trial plays a huge role in factoring-out patients. Say you meet all the criteria, but you live 300 miles away from the nearest location, unfortunately that means you can’t enroll. So how do we come up with a solution?
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The Data
Where am I getting my information from?
The National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute came together in 2006 to launch the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) a cancer genomic program. TCGA contains molecular data of over generated over 2.5 petabytes of genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data according to cancer.gov informational website. This data is publicly available for anyone in the research community to use. For the purpose of this study, I am pulling genomic data based on the mutations explicitly listed in the clinical trials I chose to use as examples.
As the above data is de-identified to protect the patients, I also consulted the list of NCI-Designated cancer centers and patient centers by state. I consulted this list as patients would have to be currently at a facility that treats cancer to be tested. I randomly assigned these locations to the patients to help create a sample population for the purpose of this study.
Findings
Bayer
Bayer has a 33% match rate for eligible patients in 100 mile radius of a trial site. This tells us that more than half of the eligible patients for this clinical trial are not able to seek this treatment due to location. These sites are located in major cities like Boston and New York City, making it hard for lower income and rural Americans to make it to a trial location.