MENURogel researcher gets $2.26M to undercover barriers to offering targeted cancer therapies
Media contact: Nicole Fawcett, 734-764-2220 | Patients may contact Cancer AnswerLine™ 800-865-1125
Grant from the NCI will fund foundational work toward ensuring all patients, practices have equal access to these promising therapies
For patients with metastatic cancer, treatments aimed at specific genes or other markers have led to significantly better outcomes, even when the prognosis seemed grim. These so-called targeted therapies have even led to cures for a small proportion of patients.
But are these therapies offered to all patients? And given a price tag that can climb above $10,000 each month, do all patients need to receive these treatments?
With a $2.26 million grant from the National Cancer Institute, Rogel Cancer Center researcher Christine Veenstra, M.D., MSHP, will seek to understand the barriers to equitable use of targeted therapies among diverse patients and diverse practice settings.
“Because of the high cost and high stakes of these therapies, it is critical to understand their patterns of use,” says Veenstra, assistant professor of hematology/oncology at Michigan Medicine. “Very little is known about targeted therapy use across diverse populations or the impact clinicians or practices have on variations in use. This baseline knowledge we gain through this work will be crucial to develop effective interventions to support equitable delivery of these therapies to the growing population of patients living with metastatic cancer.”
The grant is part of an NCI initiative to support early career investigators called MERIT, or Method to Extend Research in Time. It provides longer-term grant support to researchers within the first 10 years of their careers.
With the funding, Veenstra and team will characterize use of targeted therapy with innovative methods to augment the clinical data available in the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results database. They will also survey clinicians and practices. Based on the findings, the team will explore interventions to improve equity of access for all patients across all practices.