Panel says harness new technology for cancer imaging to boost drug discovery
The potential of data for accelerating oncology drug development was the focus of panelists Dr. Craig Tendler, Vice President, Clinical Development & Global Medical Affairs, Janssen Pharmaceutical Company of Johnson & Johnson, and Dr. Lawrence Schwartz, Department of Radiology, Columbia University Medical Center.
They discussed the future of new technologies for gathering and analyzing oncology imaging data and how that might impact fighting cancer. The conversation ranged from the technology available to perform disease assessments to the process of securing data from pharma companies.
“There has been enormous change in the landscape of imaging and drug discovery since 1976,” Schwartz said. “We have many new modalities with which to study and many different ways to analyze imaging such as 3-D, volumetrics, and artificial intelligence. The question for 2020 is how can we combine changes in imaging with changes in drug discovery and image processing to provide better biomarkers ... and provide less bias, greater accuracy but hope to decrease the size of clinical trials, decrease the cost of drug discovery and identify more rapidly key biologic steps and agents that can be regulatorily approved.”
Both speakers called on drug companies to do a better job of sharing data. Tendler said “at Janssen we have a mandate from our CEO to make data public after publication. We need to do everything possible to prioritize our delivery of data that have a real potential for helping not just our own development programs but also the patients.”