Dana-Farber's Jia Luo, MD, details on findings from the NUT Carcinoma Registry on initial chemotherapy for locally advanced and metastatic disease.
My name is Doctor Ja Luo. I'm a thoracic moto here at Dana Farber. And I have a special interest in an uncommon cancer known as nut carcinoma. Nut carcinoma was actually discovered here in 2003. And what this cancer is is it's driven by a random genetic fusion event where the nut gene is fused to an epigenetic reader gene and this leads to histone acetyl um and massive transcription including Mick uh and other transcription factors that ultimately drives this highly aggressive cancer. The cancer is underdiagnosed because uh it requires clinical intuition and is usually seen in young adults. Um And the prognosis is not great and there are currently no FDA approve approved treatments for this cancer because of this. We wanted to ask a basic question, which is what is the best first line chemotherapy for this group of patients. Luckily, we run the International Nut Carcinoma Registry, which includes patient data from all over the world. Um and individuals who are diagnosed with nut carcinoma. And so we used this registry and collected very granular data to look at this question of whether an IOS amide based chemotherapy treatment is better than a platinum based chemotherapy treatment. And what we found is that in an earlier stage setting, I phospho based treatment might be more helpful for these individuals given that it leads to a higher percentage of tumor shrinkage. But this did not translate to improved outcomes in the metastatic setting. What this overall tells us is that we need better treatments for nut carcinoma. And we at Dana Farber have already um opened several clinical trials, enrolling individuals with nut carcinoma and we have a nut carcinoma program and individuals also have the ability to sign up for the nut registry and contribute to improved outcomes in this patient population.
