MUSC Health medical oncologist John M. Wrangle, M.D., discusses the National Cancer Institute trial, Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice (NCIMATCH), which seeks to personalize treatment for patients with advanced cancer that has returned or worsened after standard systemic therapy. MUSC Hollings Cancer , an NCI-designated cancer center, is one of the sites for this study.
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JOHN WRANGLE: MATCH stands for Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice. The MATCH trial is remarkably different from other clinical trials. The typical design of a clinical trial has been to, say, a patient with lung cancer or colon cancer or breast cancer and to use one type of therapy for a very specific population. This trial allows a diverse set of malignancies to potentially be eligible for treatment with a wide variety of agents. So the purpose of this trial is to find a very diverse population of patients with cancer and match that with a similarly diverse number of drugs or anti-cancer agents. The MATCH trial targets patients with any kind of solid tumor or lymphoma or multiple myeloma. Patients enrolled in the trial will undergo a molecular analysis of their tumor in order to determine what genetic abnormalities are harbored within the tumor and to pair a therapy that we think is going to be effective for that particular abnormality with the patient. This allows patients access to drugs despite the fact that you can't necessarily design a clinical trial in one particular malignancy for that molecular abnormality. The purpose of this trial is to create a large multi-arm trial that will allow a diverse set of malignancies to be eligible for a diverse set of drugs.
