Clinical Trials in the GO Pathology Workbench

I have been asked about clinical trial matching in the GO Pathology Workbench (GO PWB) more times than I can count. A key tenet of the GO Pathology Workbench is doing everything we can to help make sure that pathologists do not miss the chance to include patients in potentially life saving clinical trials. While this question is always a great chance to talk about the efforts of our internal curation and quality assurance team (who rightly deserve the credit), it is also a chance to highlight a feature in the Workbench that can sometimes be overlooked, but has an absolutely critical function, clinical trial match.

Matching patients to clinical trials can be difficult, especially when you run into trials that have inclusion criteria that you are not testing for. For example, since we will not know if a patient has a copy number abnormality in MET when we are only testing for SNVs and InDels, we could possibly miss out on the option to enroll them in clinical trials that require MET Amplification as an inclusion criteria. The GO Pathology Workbench’s answer to this is what we refer to as Partial Match, or more accurately, Untested Biomarkers. During the GO PWB’s match process, instead of saying that a patient must match all of the inclusion criteria to be matched to a specific trial and going on, we instead first look at what the patient is being tested for. This then allows to to get the full picture of trials a patient can match to, and what others may require more testing for inclusion.

This is necessary to provide the most accurate and helpful information possible in deciding a patient’s course of treatment. Users need to trust the software they use to give the best information possible, and can’t risk missing data. When it comes to data inclusion, there are two ways to look at it. The first is exclusive, where everything that is not a perfect fit is removed. The second, and our more preferred option, is inclusive, where you allow everything that could meet your criteria in, and only remove that which absolutely fails. GenomOncology empowers the experts (our clients) to make the important decisions, and follow the inclusive approach whenever we can. This results in the GO PWB providing as much information as possibly relevant so as not to erroneously withhold any treatment options.

As we learn more through research on the relationship between new mutations and specific disease states, there will only be more clinical trials with more specific inclusion criteria. In order to make sure that we always give the power back to our users, to let them decide what treatment options they want to recommend for their patients, the GO Pathology Workbench will always make sure to give back as much relevant information as possible. Partial Match fantastically illustrates what the GO PWB is all about; using software to give Pathologists the information they need to make their decisions, and making sure that information is as complete as possible.

Interested in learning more? Check out the demo of the GO Pathology Workbench!