The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Multidisciplinary Clinics: A High-Volume Pancreatic Cancer Center Experience.

The unprecedented impact of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic (COVID-19) has strained the healthcare system worldwide. The impact is even more profound on diseases requiring timely complex multidisciplinary care such as pancreatic cancer. Multidisciplinary care teams have been affected significantly in multiple ways as healthcare teams collectively acclimate to significant space limitations and shortages of personnel and supplies. As a result, many patients are now receiving suboptimal remote imaging for diagnosis, staging, and surgical planning for pancreatic cancer. In addition, the lack of face-to-face interactions between the physician and patient and between multidisciplinary teams has challenged patient safety, research investigations, and house staff education. In this study, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed our high-volume pancreatic multidisciplinary clinic, the unique challenges faced, as well as the potential benefits that have arisen out of this situation. We also reflect on its implications for the future during and beyond the pandemic as we anticipate a hybrid model that includes a component of virtual multidisciplinary clinics as a means to provide accessible world-class healthcare for patients who require complex oncologic management.

RAD51B Harbors Germline Mutations Associated With Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma.

PURPOSE: Genetic alterations in many components of the homologous recombination, DNA damage response, and repair (HR-DDR) pathway are involved in the hereditary cancer syndromes, including familial pancreatic cancer. HR-DDR genes beyond BRCA1, BRCA2, ATM, and PALB2 may also mutate and confer the HR-DDR deficiency in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). METHODS: We conducted a study to examine the genetic alterations using a companion diagnostic 15-gene HR-DDR panel in PDACs. HR-DDR gene mutations were identified and characterized by whole-exome sequencing and whole-genome sequencing. Different HR-DDR gene mutations are associated with variable homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) scores. RESULTS: Eight of 50 PDACs with at least one HR-DDR gene mutation were identified. One tumor with BRCA2 mutations is associated with a high HRD score. However, another tumor with a CHEK2 mutation is associated with a zero HRD score. Notably, four of eight PDACs in this study harbor a RAD51B gene mutation. All four RAD51B gene mutations were germline mutations. However, currently, RAD51B is not the gene panel for germline tests. CONCLUSION: The finding in this study thus supports including RAD51B in the germline test of HR-DDR pathway genes.

Challenges of the current precision medicine approach for pancreatic cancer: A single institution experience between 2013 and 2017.

Recent research on genomic profiling of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has identified many potentially actionable alterations. However, the feasibility of using genomic profiling to guide routine clinical decision making for PDAC patients remains unclear. We retrospectively reviewed PDAC patients between October 2013 and December 2017, who underwent treatment at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and had clinical tumor next-generation sequencing (NGS) through commercial resources. Ninety-two patients with 93 tumors tested were included. Forty-eight (52%) patients had potentially curative surgeries. The median time from the tissue available to the NGS testing ordered was 229 days (interquartile range 62-415). A total of three (3%) patients had matched targeted therapies based on genomic profiling results. Genomic profiling guided personalized treatment for PDAC patients is feasible, but the percentage of patients who receive targeted therapy is low. The main challenges are ordering NGS testing early in the clinical course of the disease and the limited evidence of using a targeted approach in these patients. A real-time department level genomic testing ordering system in combination with an evidence-based flagging system for potentially actionable alterations could help address these shortcomings.