Confronting Challenges in Oncology in 2022 With Dr. Derek Raghavan

Guest host, Dr. John Sweetenham, associate director for Clinical Affairs at the UT Southwestern Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Dr. Derek Raghavan, President of the Levine Cancer Center at Atrium Health in North Carolina, discuss some of the major issues ahead for the oncology community in 2022, including tension caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, achieving true equity of care, how to use molecular testing in an optimized fashion, and the future of the oncology workforce. Transcript  Dr. John Sweetenham: Hello, and welcome to ASCO Daily News podcast. I'm John Sweetenham, the associate director for Clinical Affairs at UT Southwestern's Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and guest host of the podcast. Today, we'll be discussing the challenges ahead for the oncology community in 2022 with Dr. Derek Raghavan, President of the Levine Cancer Institute at Atrium Health in North Carolina. Our full disclosures are available in the show notes, and disclosures relating to all episodes of the podcast can be found on our transcripts at asco.org/podcasts. Derek, always a pleasure to have you here, and great to have you back on the podcast again.   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Hey, John. Always enjoy chatting together.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Derek, we're interested today to get your insights into what you think are going to be the major challenges facing the oncology community in 2022. I think each of us could come up with a pretty substantial list, but very interested to hear what you think are going to be those issues which are going to be uppermost in our mind as we move into the new year.   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Well, I think there are a number of important issues, John. I think everybody in clinical practice, medical or nursing, or whatever, have been brutalized somewhat by the COVID-19 pandemic, and I think everyone's tired and a bit cranky, and they're upset with a schism between the fringe and the science-based clinicians. So, I think that underscores everything. And there's an anxiety and a tension that I think is just new.   From the practical standpoint, which is where I think your question is directed, yeah, I think there will be issues that relate to achieving true equity of care. And I think hopefully, the focus will move from analysis paralysis to actually doing things and measuring outcomes. I think there will be the tension between value, price, and cost. People are spending an awful lot of money on health care. That's going to be an issue.   We have very good information on molecular prognostication, but a lot of the data that are coming out are from technologies that are not fully validated and not even standardized. There's a lot of disinformation and misinformation coming out, and I think we're going to have to address that. I think those are 3 themes that could keep us talking for quite a while.   I think the other thing, which is more up your alley than mine, is we've been watching CAR T[-cell therapy] emerge. I think we've got a beginnings of a pretty good handle on how CAR T[-cell] relates to hematological malignancy. It's much less clear in the solid tumors, and there is a bit of a tendency to do what used to happen in the 1970s and '80s, which is here's a new treatment. Let's give it a whack and see what happens.   But this is very expensive. We don't want to fall into the trap of how bone marrow transplant was introduced as a standard of breast care management for nearly a decade, based on somewhat flimsy evidence. So, we need to be a little more thoughtful about how we introduce CAR T[-cells] into the solid tumors.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Thanks. Yeah, plenty to discuss there, as you say. And what I'd like to do just because it is such a topical issue and continues to be at the moment is just pick up a little on the COVID-19 theme. I think that we've all seen a great deal of discussion in recent months about many of the consequences of COVID-19, including delayed screenings, late diagnosis, clinician burnout, and so on. But I'm interested in your insights on a couple of things.   Number 1, since we're now seeing the emergence of further new variants, what do you think that this is going to mean for the oncology community in terms of handling these new variants within the context of our patients with cancer? And then secondly, because I'm intrigued by one of the things you mentioned in our discussions about this podcast, you mentioned the changed relationship between health professionals and parts of the community as a consequence of COVID-19. And interested to hear you expand just a little bit on that. So, kind of 2 questions wrapped up in 1 there.   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Yeah. Well, I think the 2 are connected. The old style of physicians has always liked to be sure of their ground and to have a firm database when they talk about things. Particularly with the new variants, while it's completely appropriate to be transparent about the fact that they knew that they seemed different and so on, I think there is the problem that there are a lot of physicians who are now becoming TV personalities as much as physicians and who are talking all the time.   I'm not critical of that, but the problem is that they're being honest in saying we don't really know this, but this is what I think, and then they have to change direction. So, what's happening is, for the first time in a long time, physicians are regularly being quoted and being seen as saying things that are not necessarily correct, and that reduces confidence by the community and the physicians. At the same time, COVID-19, in my view, highly, inappropriately became a political football.   You have people who have absolutely no training, so radio hosts, football quarterbacks, basketball stars making extraordinary statements about COVID-19 and their approach to vaccination, masking, and other things where they have absolutely no business doing it. But they are people who are believed. They're high profile. And so, there's now a schism emerging between patients who listen to people who have no medical training at all and no basis for what they say and those particularly in the political domain who have politicized this and created a situation where, once upon a time, a physician was at least seen as coming from the right place and with good intent.   But we've both seen so many of these public demonstrations where physicians and public health physicians are being castigated for simply espousing good practice. Now, with respect to managing the variants, I think the fact is we have some basic principles that I have believed now for 2 years. Masks reduce the chance of getting any type of COVID-19. They just do. If you wear a mask most of the time when you're out and about, you're going to cut your chances down. Vaccination reduces the chance of ending up in the ICU unless you have some sort of immunological deficit.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Yeah. I'm going to switch gears now and return to the first thing that you mentioned right up front, which is the issue of equity and how we are going to address equity issues in the coming year. I think that in many ways, 2020, going into 2021, has been 2 years where issues of equity in health care have really come to the fore. And of course, there's been a great deal of discussion around this.   And I think you'd agree with me that we've seen, at the same time, that some of the strategies that we have been using during the COVID-19 pandemic, including telehealth, which one would have hoped would be a great equalizer, actually has the potential to exacerbate some of the disparities that we've been seeing in health care. But you mentioned analysis paralysis, and just to pick up on that theme, despite the huge amount of coverage that equity has received in medical journals and the media, where do you think we actually are in finally truly addressing some of the cancer care disparities that we see?   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Well, I think, John, you know that I was one of the early chairs of the ASCO Task Force. Otis Brawley and I chaired that task force together. Very early in the piece, I'm going to say probably 15 years ago, we wrote really quite a strong position paper on this whole issue. And so, we got started early in doing stuff on what we thought would be important, and we did, with support from the Komen Foundation, was to start training people of color in the oncology space and keeping them working in underserved communities by paying off their college loans for the period of time that they did that.   So, people have been doing stuff for a while. I think what's happened in the last decade, and it has been a slow change, is that there's been more a move to saying, let's get started. So, if you look at Chris Lathan up at Harvard, at one of their underserved hospitals, if you look around the country, consider the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation, which puts money into active projects that are about doing stuff rather than having meetings to consider doing stuff. I think there's been that swing.   Dr. John Sweetenham: When we think about equity and disparities of care, we're often drawn towards the cost of cancer care and how much that plays into disparities and inequity in the delivery of cancer care. And picking up on that theme that you mentioned around value, cost and price, and maybe we could think about linking that with the use of CAR T-cell therapy and the application of CAR T-cells in the solid tumor world, if that is going to happen, what do you think we can do during 2022 to confront some of the cost and price issues that we're seeing within our cancer care environment right now?   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Well, I sometimes think in a utopian fashion, which doesn't get me very far, I have to say. What I'd love to see in the United States, because we spend far more money on everything health-wise than any other country in the civilized or uncivilized world, but what I'd like to see is a bipartisan initiative run by people who actually understand health care and health care economics that would go to the issue of, how do you get better bang for your buck? And it would include doing some tough things.   We waste money outrageously. We'll treat third-line metastatic pancreas cancer off trial. Nothing works in third-line metastatic pancreas cancer off trial. It's worth maybe a clinical trial to help the next person in line. That's how we make progress. But just to keep giving the same old litany of drugs in the hope that it might work is a waste of money. As I talked about before, BMT for breast cancer turned out to be a huge waste of money over a long period of time. So, if you can actually create a scenario where government set some rules and took the courageous, and this why it would have to be bipartisan, it would actually start to rationalize health care.   You know, John, the Oregon experiment many years ago, where one party started to rationalize care, and the other party accused them of rationing care. I mean, you can't have that happen. We've also seen both sides allocate the task of developing health care algorithms to people who are great politicians but know nothing about health care or economics. So, I mean, there are easy ways to do it. What we can do ourselves is be honest. Tell people what bang they'll get for their buck.   The person who is likely to have, say, an 80% chance of being dead within 4 months may not wish to mortgage his house if he's told that. On the other hand, he might well want to mortgage his house if he thinks that a very expensive treatment will give him the chance of being alive in 5 years. So, we, as physicians, shouldn't make that decision. It's the patient's right to be able to choose life versus the life of their offspring and spouse and future generations. So, I think it's not that complex, and I think if we brought more transparency about good expectations versus poor expectations, gave a better reason for patients getting more involved in trials, we're still at less than 15% of patients with cancer in the USA getting involved in trials, and that's a tragedy.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Yeah, I think also, the other thing that's occurred to me in this context, is the fact that while we tend to hone in on costs of treatment when we get into these discussions, I've been seeing some emerging literature around the cost of follow-up and unnecessary follow-up and imaging and so on in those patients who are in survivorship part of their cancer journey. And there's a huge opportunity there, I think, for us to reduce costs of care with no impact whatsoever on survival, no difficult treatment decisions to be made because we're simply doing an enormous amount of unnecessary testing in these patients who have completed treatment that we know doesn't impact survival. So, I do think that we could take a really serious look at that and make very significant savings. So, I think there's lots of potential there too.   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Yes. I agree, John. And I'd actually give kudos to ASCO in this space because they were early adopters of the Choosing Wisely campaign. They wrote two sets of guidelines about stupid things that we do that make no difference. And to be honest, I think that--I was on that committee, and the committee got tired.   I was one of the few people that actually felt we should keep going and very actively keep issuing guidelines of things that just aren't worth doing and having symposia at the ASCO ASM say that the symposia that are entitled “How to Waste Money” or alternatively entitled “How to Stop Doing Dumb Stuff” would be really quite important. And it would give the basis for sensible medicine to people who do medical legal protection work. So, most people who do multiple PET scans on lymphoma where the patient is completely well and blah, blah, blah are doing it for medical-legal reasons. They're not doing it because they think it will make a huge difference.   And I, of course, am not talking about the people where they're following PET scans as markers of response. So, I think we can do this work. I'd love to see a presidential campaign which is about not doing dumb stuff and where ASCO takes the bully pulpit and says, “we're spending a year policing ourselves, talking about all the things we do that don't actually make things better for patients.”   Dr. John Sweetenham: So, let's extend this theme of expensive therapies. And you mentioned CAR T-cell therapy. And in the hematologic malignancy world, we're now just beginning to see 1 or 2 results, which will be presented at the American Society of Hematology meeting in a couple of weeks from now, positive results from a couple of randomized clinical trials in hematologic malignancy with CAR T-cell therapy. So, what are your thoughts on the application of this treatment in the solid tumor world, and where do you think we are, what do you think we might see during 2022?   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Well, let's talk strategy first. I think a good place to begin is with a good scientific hypothesis. So, we both know how CAR T[-cells] work. We don't have to have a long discussion here about them. It would be patronizing to the audience. But you might think about, what solid tumor is actually going to benefit from immunological manipulation? Where have the checkpoint inhibitors been helpful, and where have they not been helpful? And so, you might focus the initial part of CAR T[-cells] and solid tumor work on those where there's a hypothesis that makes sense.   Then the second thing you could do would be to actually come to the companies that make all their money from CAR T[-cells] and say, perhaps you could invest in this research with us, and we'll do a couple of Hail Mary passes. So, let's look at the tumors where there isn't a good hypothesis, but nothing works, and see if we can get an experience. So, that'd be a nice, simple, easy way to do it. And then measure tight outcomes, have very robust entry criteria so you don't get confused about various toxicities because you're actually starting with patients in reasonable shape and then expanding to all populations.   So, the first part would be phase 1 and 2. Then you, early in the piece, make sure that you have inclusiveness so that you know all the population groups that might benefit from the treatment. I think that'd be a reasonable way to go.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Talking about identifying targets appropriately and target populations for treatment, you had mentioned as one of your other challenges for 2022 the concept around identifying molecular subgroups and molecular prognostication as a way of patient selection. So, could you say a little bit more about that and what you think we're going to need to do in the coming year in terms of refinement of targets?   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Well, John, this is an area of your expertise as well, coming from the hematological malignancy world. Now, I hope we would both agree that having robust reproducible technology is important. The fact that there are so many molecular diagnostic companies that hype their product doesn't necessarily mean that the product is good. So, there needs to be standardization of approaches to using technology, to measuring outcomes.   We need to have comparative sets of data, looking at different technologies to see how they work, and those sorts of studies need to be funded by government because there's no particular reason for the companies to agree to perhaps show that their diagnostic technology is not as good as somebody else's. But this would be a good initiative for the government to actually start to rank order of the products that are out there. I, frankly, think when you think of the impact of all of these molecular diagnostic tests, I've never understood why so many of them are out there without tight U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation. So, I think that's a place to begin.   If you think back to the old breast cancer days when there was immunohistochemistry and a bunch of molecular technologies, the outcomes were so varied when compared on common tumor samples. So, we just seem to be quite comfortable to make the same set of mistakes again. I do think there are responsible investigators doing excellent work in the space, so I'm not critical of the space. I'm answering the question, which is we need now to bring some regulation in to ensure that the quality of the work, reproducibility of the work. You'll even see, and I know you and I have talked about this in the past, there'll be Mr. X who has prostate cancer and gets his PSA measured, which is Prostate-Specific Antigen, looking at how active the cancer is regularly in different labs. That makes absolutely no sense. There's no common standard. PSA in my lab is going to be different from PSA in your's. And so there just should be some nice, simple rules of how to use molecular testing in an optimized fashion.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Yeah, and I wonder also whether we need to be looking a little bit more closely at point of care clinical decision support for some oncologists who may not be as molecularly literate as others because I do think that's another real challenge at the moment is giving guidance to everyone who might see these patients in terms of treatment selection.   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Well, I agree with you completely. I mean, kudos to the major companies because most of them provide pretty good decision support. One with which we worked tended to be a little too positive about its product, and we worked to change that. And now they're actually very useful. We have a big series from our molecular tumor board here that runs over I think a 5-year period that Carol Farhangfar, PhD, has just submitted for publication, which shows that you can heavily influence people who are out in the community by providing centralized support for their use of molecular diagnostic tests. But again, we only deal with the major companies so that we think there's good quality control there. And we don't flip back and forth in an individual patient between one company and another.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Right. Well, I think we're almost out of time, Derek, but I did want to ask you one more question, and it's a real change of gear. But over the last year or so, I think that probably largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen some exacerbation of workforce issues in the oncology workforce that we knew already existed. I think there is undoubtedly more burnout being reported than there was before. Certainly, within our own organization, we have seen some increased staff turnover and a number of people who I think, frankly, have realized that they want to move closer to their families.   And so, there's been a certain amount of churn, which I think many of us in cancer centers are experiencing. Interested to know whether you've seen anything similar and what strategies you're using in terms of staff retention and oncology clinician burnout at your center.   Dr. Derek Raghavan: I think this is a difficult problem. The morale at the Levine Cancer Institute, much like the Simmons Cancer Center, is high, and that's driven by the leadership cadre being out there with their troops, visible and actively engaged so that the troops on the line feel that the bosses are part of the deal. And we do silly little things that matter, which is parties and celebrations and thank yous and all that sort of stuff. We get the staff to thank each other. We encourage the patients to thank the staff just with an attaboy or something that just says we appreciate the care.   So, I think this is a challenge. I do think work-life balance in old geezers like you and me has been a slightly different thing from some of the younger physicians who are spending, I think sensibly, more time with their families and don't want to spend these long hours. I think the other thing is there is still a town-gown issue where there are people who can make a lot more money much more quickly in some parts of non-academic practice, and it's getting harder to publish in academic practice, so the rewards for that are slipping a little.   I actually don't really have a solution. I think that the august colleges drawing to the attention of the world that this is a big deal and engaging bipartisan support from the political machinery will be important. I think ASCO can, through its government relations people (ASCO Advocacy), continue to prosecute these issues, which they do. I think there is the mistake that we make in the cancer space is we do still tend to compete between societies.   I've always thought it would be much healthier to have ASCO, ASTRO, ACS, SUO, SSO and all those people having a common council that speaks on this sort of issue with one voice and draws to attention of the people out there that this is a big issue. The best of the doctors (docs) are getting older. The younger docs come through the Taylor laws are less experienced and less well-trained and have a different ethos. So, we're going to lose an aspect of practice that's been part of the tradition of medical practice since the time of Osler, and it's definitely going away.   I have a superb physician fellow working with me at the moment who I would rate as one of the best 3 in 10 years. The reason she's one of the best 3 in 10 years is she practices the style of medicine that my fellows did 25, 30 years ago, most of whom are now professors of medicine somewhere. And good with patients, knows her staff, does research, and somehow manages to have reasonable time for a family. That tradition is starting to go away, and I don't think there is a simple change. And then the final point, the people who run health care today see it as a business. I was in a meeting recently outside my own domain where someone said, you know, I have to figure out whether medicine is really importantly a health care business or whether it's an IT business focused on health care. And that's going to start to lose the human side of medicine. We spent some time on that today. The outcomes will go down if this is just a business.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Well, thanks, Derek. Really appreciate all of your insights today. I think there's no doubt that 2022 is going to be a year of many challenges for those of us in the oncology community and for our patients, but I think it's also inevitably going to be a very exciting year in terms of new developments.   And hopefully, if we're recording another podcast like this in a year from now, the COVID-19 pandemic will be a little bit more in the rearview mirror, and we will be able to focus on many of the other important issues that face us. So again, really appreciate your sharing your insights with us, and wish you all the best for 2022.   Dr. Derek Raghavan: John, always a pleasure chatting, and the same to you and Caroline and the family.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Thank you. And thanks to our listeners for your time today. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.   Disclosures: Dr. John Sweetenham: Consulting or Advisory Role: EMA Wellness   Dr. Derek Raghavan: Consulting or Advisory Role: Gerson Lehrman Group, Caris Life Sciences   Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guests' statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO.  The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.