CPL #77 - Finding Personalized Cancer Treatments Beyond the Standard through a Unique Test (Travera)
Channel: Cancer Patient Lab
Date: 29/12/2023

Cancer Patient Lab Meeting #77 - November 8, 2023
Discussion at: community.cancerpatientlab.org
Full transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hyJTPOu8Wk3nHkKcFk0BHVpB6kBUk-42ZbJhgYCJC_s/edit?usp=sharing

00:00:00 Cancer patient data and technology
00:02:14 Personalized cancer treatment using ex vivo drug testing
00:06:35 Improving ex vivo drug testing using a new technology
00:11:50 Using mass measurement to detect cancer drug effectiveness
00:16:45 Cancer treatment personalized with live cell testing
00:23:43 Biopsy testing for cancer treatment
00:29:14 Cancer treatment and testing with a new approach
00:34:17 Cancer diagnosis and treatment using single-cell analysis
00:39:02 Drug testing and tumor cell isolation
00:44:05 Cancer drug response analysis and genomics
00:48:06 Liquid biopsy technology for cancer diagnosis and treatment
00:53:21 Analyzing cancer cell responses to drugs


Brad Power and Richard Anders

“The idea of Travera is … narrow the list of those FDA-indicated drugs that are most likely to or have a higher likelihood of eliciting a clinical response in a specific patient.” – Dennis Watson

“We love to use the word ‘personalized’ in the genomic and genetic testing space. But the reality is, in most cases it is just smaller populations. If you're talking about a BRCA mutation for example, you're just part of a smaller population than you were before. That still isn't truly personalized therapy. What we're doing here at Travera is truly N-of-1 work.” – Dennis Watson

Meeting Summary
As an advanced cancer patient looking at your treatment options, how can you decide what will work for you? If you have multiple drug options, how do you decide which ones have the best potential to make an impact for you and your unique cancer?
The standard process for personalized cancer treatment is to sequence the DNA of your tumor, then identify mutations that point to a particular drug. But even with more and more highly-targeted drugs being developed, the odds of finding an “actionable” mutation are still low (depending on the cancer, perhaps in the single digits), and even drugs that work on these mutations may not provide the desired response rates. There is lots of room to improve.
Dennis Watson, Vice President of Business Development at Travera, is uniquely qualified to discuss one way to increase the range of personalized treatments you might consider: “functional testing”. Dennis has been working in genetics and genomics of cancer for over 15 years, and joined Travera in 2022. In addition, Rob Kimmerling, Travera’s chief technical officer, and Mark Stevens, Travera’s vice president of clinical development, were in the lab at MIT where Travera’s unique weighing technology was developed.

Discussion topics:
What is “functional testing”?
For more on functional testing, please see previous discussions we have had, including with Tony Letai of Dana Farber (#11), Payel Chaterjee of SEngine (#13), Noah Berlow and Diana Azzam of First Ascent (#18), and Robert Nagourney of the Nagourney Cancer Institute (#30).

Why might you want to get a “functional test”?

What is the Travera functional test, and how does it work?

Why might you not want to get a “functional test”?

When should you get a functional test?

What are the barriers to getting “functional testing”?

How can you overcome the barriers to accessing functional tests?

How can you access this technology and help Travera’s expanding validation efforts?

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