Building on strong foundations
By David Eberhard, CMO
The American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO®) Annual Meeting has traditionally been the largest and most prominent venue for the sharing of leading-edge progress in cancer care. This year’s meeting held June 3-7, 2022, in Chicago, marked the first return to live, in-person meetings since the COVID-19 pandemic began nearly three years ago. This year’s ASCO meeting was also a landmark event for Inivata.
Over the past year, in collaboration with our partners, we have been presenting and publishing the results of clinical studies demonstrating the clinical validity and initial utility of our RaDaR™ assay for Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) and surveillance for recurrence of disease in cancer patients with solid tumors. We have also been sharing further supporting evidence of the clinical utility of our InVisionFirst™-Lung test in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Our ASCO presence this year included a platform presentation demonstrating the ability of the RaDaR assay to predict the recurrence of hormone receptor-positive breast cancer at prolonged intervals (> 5yrs) after surgery and adjuvant therapy. These patients comprise a large segment of the breast cancer population and are difficult to study because of the length of time to recurrence. This study was simultaneously published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology which resulted in a significant level of scientific interest in the data.
Additional presentations on the RaDaR assay at ASCO 2022 demonstrated its use in a variety of different tumor types and clinical settings (neoadjuvant, MRD and surveillance in head and neck cancer, breast, and melanoma), further suggesting that the RaDaR assay has the potential to be a broad-spectrum tool to inform treatment decisions throughout the journey of patients with solid cancers.
ASCO 2022 also signified a more personal milestone, my six-month anniversary of joining Inivata as Chief Medical Officer. Over the past two decades I have been focused on the analysis of cancer genomes to investigate how these could correlate with cancer treatments, to transform cancer patient care. I’ve approached this in different ways over the years, working in pharma, academia and diagnostic companies. Many amazing advances have been made over this time, and one of the most exciting yet in my mind is the development of liquid biopsy as a tool to reveal the genomic secrets in each patient’s cancer and guide the optimal personalized course of care for that patient. Being at Inivata gives me the opportunity to help show that the promises of liquid biopsy can become realities, and the reward of knowing that our efforts have the potential to make a profound difference to many patients.
A successful start-up company in clinical oncology must grow and mature into an organization that provides life-changing and life-saving products, addressing unmet medical needs. I believe that Inivata has a solid foundation, created by our dedicated scientific founders, Nitzan Rosenfeld and Tim Forshew, on which to build. The acquisition of the company by NeoGenomics hugely strengthens that foundation. The detailed blueprints for how we continue to build Inivata are evolving but regardless of the path, I believe this growth is firmly supported by these strong foundations.
The race to develop MRD products is hot and getting hotter by the day. Many companies are seeing the importance of these products and the competition is fierce. I look forward to being part of Inivata’s continued growth and development into a strong, mature world-class provider of innovative products that fill important unmet needs.
Here’s to our ongoing mission of delivering life-changing science to cancer patients.
