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Access Through Innovation: The Power of Smarter Cancer Care Strategies
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Released: July 15, 2025

Expiration: July 14, 2026

John Marshall
John Marshall, MD
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Access Through Innovation: The Power of Smarter Cancer Care Strategies

 

[00:00:05] John Marshall, MD: John Marshall for Oncology Unscripted. Really no script at all, but we are post-ASCO here in Washington, DC, trying to take all of those major innovations that we all get so excited about—curves with big deltas that we saw in all sorts of different cancers, including the humblest of them all: GI cancers.

 

So, now the question is: how do you take those innovations and those changes—some of them are added to NCCN, some of them may be FDA-approved, some of them in The New England Journal of Medicine, some not—and apply them to our patients? Many of them are novel tests, maybe not covered by insurance.

 

Many of them are new drugs that don't have a label and may not yet be approved by healthcare coverage. Many of them, as we will talk about, are not available to most of the world. In fact, they're only available to us here in the wealthy corners of our planet. And so, how do we go from that innovation to the patient to realize those benefits?

 

I want to highlight two papers because, thematically, they go along with what we are talking about this cycle. So, you've probably seen this journal before—it's called The New England Journal of Medicine—but I want you to make sure and look at this paper by Andrea Cercek. You know about it. This is using IO therapy in MSI-high positive primary cancers, and of course the rectal cancer data. This bar plot right here: 100% of patients with rectal cancer, MSI-high, had a positive clinical response and didn't need surgery. It's not quite 100% in some of these other cancers, but it's dramatically positive, and we here in the United States have access to those therapies for patients with these dramatically positive benefits. But, as you will hear, not everybody has that access and, therefore, they don't even really want to know what their MSI-high status is, because they can't do anything about it.

 

A second paper, also from a journal you've probably seen before—recent cover change; I kinda like the old cover better myself—Journal of Clinical Oncology. This is also a GI cancer paper. This is from a European consortium group, and there are also some US folks here. They took samples from adjuvant clinical trials in colon cancer and developed a sort of digital path–generated signal of risk, and were able to sort patients into their risk categories so that we could know who needs chemotherapy and who doesn't—who's going to benefit from chemotherapy and who doesn't. Similar to what we are seeing with the MRD ctDNA testing.

 

This is pretty damn cool because everyone's getting surgery, or most of the world who has healthcare is getting surgery. The analysis that this requires is actually relatively inexpensive compared to some of the fancier tests that are out there. It enables a sorting of patients into risk factors—so much, importantly, for whom needs treatment. Because, right now, we're treating everybody. But more importantly, who doesn't need treatment? How much value can we find with these tests that actually identify the patient who's already cured or who will be upfront resistant to the treatment, therefore not needing it?

 

This is really where AI is going. And both of these papers speak to this concept of access and value. When something's a 100% benefit rate, the whole world should have access to that—and that's where you can have MSI for rectal cancer with IO therapy. When, on the other hand, an inexpensive test—a series of tests—can show you who needs treatment and who doesn't, there's incredible value. The whole world saves money if we can apply that kind of metric to decision-making going forward.

 

So, I think these two papers are really good examples of how the progress we are making improves the value and our efficiency going forward, so that as we approach the next generation of cancer care and cancer interventions, we can do it better, more effectively, less expensively—so that one day we can say, yeah, that was worth it.

 

John Marshall for Oncology Unscripted.