Original from: genomeweb

Precision Medicine Asia and the National Cancer Center Hospital East in Japan are building a lung cancer clinicopathological genomic database and screening infrastructure that spans seven countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the groups said Wednesday.

Precision Medicine Asia (Premia), a cancer screening network, already manages a clinical-genomic lung cancer database, dubbed Lung Cancer Genomic Screening Project for Individualized Medicine in Asia (LC-SCRUM-Asia), through which patients in Japan and Taiwan can be identified for clinical trial enrollment. That database will be integrated into the new program — LC-SCRUM-Asia Pacific, or LC-SCRUM-AP — which will also incorporate patients from other countries in the region.

Patients with advanced or recurrent non-small cell lung cancer will be able to undergo genomic screening through an LC-SCRUM-AP platform developed by Premia. Their clinical and genomic information will be held in a database for analysis and clinical trial identification.

The goal is for information in LC-SCRUM-AP to spur development of precision oncology therapies and diagnostics in the Asia-Pacific region, according to Premia. Drugs targeting EGFR, ALK, ROS1, BRAF, NTRK, MET, RET, and KRAS gene mutations have already been approved in Japan but may not be available in other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Establishing a large-scale genomic database to identify and study patients with such mutations, some of which are rare, will help to accelerate development and commercialization of therapies targeting these mutations across multiple countries, Premia said.

LC-SCRUM-AP is launching in partnership with about 20 institutions in Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, and Taiwan.

The National Cancer Center Hospital East initially launched LC-SCRUM-Asia as LC-SCRUM-Japan in 2013. It expanded to include other East Asian countries in 2019. More than 17,000 lung cancer patients have undergone genomic screening and have data in the LC-SCRUM-Asia database as of September.

Source: Japanese Lung Cancer Genomic Screening Project Expands in Asia-Pacific