Lily Oncology's New Tool Measures Innovation

Oncologists will now be able to measure progress in cancer treatments.

The debate about the status of oncology innovation is one of great importance to physicians within the field.

The stepwise nature of oncology innovation makes it difficult to assess progress against the various forms of cancer. It is for this reason that oncologists frequently disagree about the extent of past achievements, the current greatest unmet needs and priorities for future efforts.

But with the advent of Lily Oncology’s Patient Access to Cancer care Excellence (PACE) Continuous Innovation Indicators (CII), oncologists will now be able to measure progress in cancer treatments with flexibility to accommodate different cancer subtypes and treatment modalities.

Lily Oncology’s PACE CII is a first-ever, scientifically rigorous tool that seeks to address this dilemma by aggregating 40 years of oncology data in one place to enable users to visualize and measure progress in lung and other cancers, while making comparisons across tumor types, disease stages, and treatments to identify where unmet needs exist. A presentation will be given on September 7, 2015 at the 16^th World Conference on Lung Cancer to discuss how the tool works and what significance it will have in the world of oncology.

Lead CII researcher Silvia Paddock, PhD, will demonstrate the tool at the conference and illustrate how it can help researchers, policymakers, advocates, and others objectively understand past progress and current needs in areas such as non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in a broader context.

The tool works by gathering the primary literature and recording statistical measures of relevant outcomes in a standardized format called “Pieces of Evidence.”

The Pieces of Evidence are then classified by their therapeutic goals, creating a map of available treatments across different stages of disease. Analyses can then be weighted by therapeutic goals or restricted to specific disease subtypes or classes of treatment. The CII currently contains data on NSCLC and 11 other solid tumors.

By using the CII, scientists were able to ascertain steady progress in the development of chemotherapeutic agents against NSCLC since 1990. Particularly, there is greater progress observed against non-squamous versus squamous NSCLC.

Aligning progress curves with drug approval rates helps scientists to measure how important new treatments are to contributing to progress. Importantly, the CII highlights a critical unmet need in NSCLC: there are no curative therapies for regional or metastatic disease supported by current evidence.

The CII could offer a significant new tool that will help researchers and oncologists alike ascertain what steps need to be taken in order to maintain steady progress within the field of oncology. With the advent of this novel technology, researchers and oncologists will be able to identify areas of need within the field, as well as clearly measure the rate of progress over the past 40 years.