A public-private collaboration among the National Cancer Institute (NCI), SWOG Cancer Research, Friends of Cancer Research, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), five pharmaceutical companies (Amgen, Genentech, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and AstraZeneca’s global biologics R&D arm, MedImmune), and Foundation Medicine recently announced the initiation of the Lung Cancer Master Protocol (Lung-MAP) trial.
Lung-MAP is a multidrug, multiarm, biomarker-driven clinical trial for patients with advanced squamous cell lung cancer. The trial will use genomic profiling to match patients to one of several different investigational treatments that are designed to target the genomic alterations found to be driving the growth of their cancer. This innovative approach to clinical testing aims to improve access to promising drugs for patients and ease the significant recruitment and infrastructure burdens on researchers involved in traditional clinical trials.
“This diverse, collaborative approach, with support from leading lung cancer advocacy organizations, helps to ensure that the needs of patients, clinicians, developers, and regulators are all considered in the design and operation of the trial,” said Ellen V. Sigal, PhD, Chair and Founder of Friends of Cancer Research.
First Five Drugs
The trial will initially test five experimental drugs—four targeted therapies and an anti–PD-L1 immunotherapy. It is anticipated that between 500 and 1,000 patients will be screened per year for over 200 cancer-related genes for genomic alterations. The results of this test will be used to assign each patient to the trial arm that is best matched to their tumor’s genomic profile.
“Lung-MAP represents the first of several planned large, genomically driven treatment trials that will be conducted by NCI’s newly formed National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN),” said Jeff Abrams, MD, Associate Director of NCI’s Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program. “The restructuring and consolidation of NCI’s large trial treatment program, resulting in the formation of the NCTN, is quite timely, as it now can offer an ideal platform for bringing the benefits of more precise molecular diagnostics to cancer patients in communities large and small.”
More Efficient Model
Lung-MAP aims to establish a model of clinical testing that more efficiently meets the needs of both patients and drug developers. Whereas a typical clinical trial for a targeted therapy tests each potential patient for a single biomarker and enrolls only a portion—sometimes a very small portion—of patients tested, Lung-MAP will simultaneously test patients for many biomarkers including selected base substitutions and small in/dels, gene fusions, and amplifications in order to assess compatibility with several different experimental treatments. All patients tested will then be enrolled into one of Lung-MAP’s five trial arms.
Lung-MAP will make it easier for patients and researchers to find one another. It will also be more flexible than traditional clinical trial models. Where typical clinical trials require the development of new protocols for each new drug tested, Lung-MAP uses a single “master protocol,” which can be amended as needed as drugs enter and exit the trial, preserving infrastructure and patient outreach efforts.
Over 200 Medical Centers
The trial will be conducted at over 200 medical centers by NCI’s NCTN, led by SWOG, and partly funded by NCI through its Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program. Significant additional funding will be provided by the participating companies as part of a partnership managed by FNIH that also involves the Food and Drug Administration[www.fda.gov], Friends of Cancer Research, and other patient advocacy organizations. The trial infrastructure is capable of testing as many as five to seven additional drugs over the next 5 years, and will cost up to $160 million. ■
