Before COVID-19 lockdowns halted travel, I attended a community cancer conference in Washington D.C. last year. I had an interesting conversation with a community practice leader, Jessica, about how socioeconomic factors have a big impact on clinical outcomes. In the last few months, I have been researching value-based care innovations in cancer care. I was encouraged to find multiple examples of value-based care initiatives that also focus on reducing disparities. How are they approaching challenges of inequity in cancer care? Here are three initiatives with innovative approaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic has delayed thousands of surgical procedures across the country, including tissue biopsies needed for cancer diagnosis. But it’s also pushing demand for alternatives that allow patients to be tested for signs of tumours without even needing to enter a hospital. As part of a new pilot called Project ACTT, more than 800 Canadian cancer patients have been tested through liquid biopsies, which involve taking a blood sample and looking for signs of tumour DNA. That federally funded project, a partnership led by Vancouver-based Canexia Health, offers the potential for a more efficient alternative for cancer testing that can save hospital resources and lower the risk of infection.

Last spring’s wave of COVID-19 delays to cancer care, and a prolonged pandemic, have resulted in disturbing trends for patients that, while not unexpected, are now being quantified. Dozens of major cancer centers and organizations across the US, including the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and American Cancer Society, issued an urgent call to action: cancer screening and treatment during COVID-19 must resume at full speed and at full scale.

This technical note describes the NGS assays developed by Canexia Health for somatic testing of adult solid tumors and how they are made available through local laboratories via our proprietary technology transfer model.

Earlier this year, Canexia Health launched Project ACTT, Access to Cancer Testing & Treatment in Response to COVID-19, with support from the Canadian federal government via the Digital Technology Supercluster. Through ACTT, we are leading a consortium of partners to speed up cancer testing in Canada for targeted treatment selection during the pandemic through minimally invasive circulating tumor (ctDNA) testing.

Canexia Health's Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer David Hunstman was recently interviewed by OncLive as part of their OncLive On Air Podcast. In this exclusive interview, Dr. Huntsman discusses the elements of precision medicine that have contributed to its growth in oncology, some of the setbacks regarding its integration, and areas of research that have the potential to propel precision medicine to the next tier of scientific discovery and application.

Developing the business case for bringing cancer testing in-house can be a daunting task for laboratory, pathology, and other scientific professionals. In this presentation, Dr. Gregory Tranah, of Sutter Health, discusses opportunities and challenges that bringing in-house testing to a large, complex, health system presents. Dr. Tranah will discuss critical success factors such as personalization, portability, safety, and accessibility for others who are considering embarking on this path.

COVID-19 has created serious challenges for people living with advanced-stage cancer. In response, Canexia Health launched Project ACTT this summer, a federally-funded program to provide liquid biopsy testing to 2,000 patients across Canada with advanced or metastatic breast, lung, and colorectal cancer. Here is one patient’s story.