Hello, and welcome to the Becker's Health Care
podcast.
I'm Elizabeth Gregersen,
a reporter here at Becker's, and I'm thrilled
to interview doctor Zhang, vice president of oncology
research of the OSF
Health Care Cancer Institute on the podcast today.
Doctor Zhang, thank you so much for joining
me. I am so grateful to share your
insights with our podcast audience. Could you give
us just a brief little intro about yourself
and your organization?
Yeah. Thank you. It is really nice to
be here today.
So I'm doctor Zhang. I am a medical
oncologist,
primarily focused on thoracic oncology,
meaning that I, take care of patients
with their cancer, you know, developed in the
thoracic cavity or or chest.
So in that case, primary will be different
kinds of lung cancer,
but also actually patients with stomach cancer mesothelioma.
Now at the same time, I was also
trained as a cancer biologist,
so, therefore, I also conduct research.
My research,
spend
basically from,
really preclinical laboratory research
all the way to different phases of clinical
trials to help our patients.
So, really,
my,
passion is
utilizing my,
experience or expertise to bring,
from the bench side, which is the laboratory,
to the bedside, which is a clinical setting.
So, you know, trying to,
really bring new discoveries to our patients.
But it is in time if I see
some important questions,
arising from clinical side, I'm trying to answer
that as well through research.
Perfect.
I'm so grateful to have you, to kinda
share your perspective.
As vice president of oncology research, I'd love
to know what some of the, you know,
first priorities, the top focuses
will be for you and for OSF in
terms of oncology research.
Sure.
So when we're talking about oncology research,
this is basically cover a full spectrum of,
various research activities.
As I mentioned earlier, that, it includes,
like, really early stage preclinical laboratory research
and all the way to the clinical trials
that we benefit our patients directly.
But then even in a clinical trial setting,
we have other
research such as, for example, outcome research,
translational
research,
quality research,
and even cost effective analysis
to see which, treatment is the, best for
our patients.
You know, with all this research, we have
made two major focus,
Both me and our also our OSF Cancer
Institute,
we're trying to focus in two major areas.
One is,
the,
prevention
and early detection of cancer.
As we know, that prevention is, in fact,
the best treatment for for cancer.
We want to get rid of cancer be
before it becomes out of control. Right?
But then when cancer really becomes
advanced
or sometimes metastatic,
then we want to have really innovative clinical
trials or new treatment for our patients.
And for that reason,
we have,
established what we call breakthrough treatment center. So
breakthrough
treatment center is,
is really focusing on bringing innovative,
trials, especially
early phase clinical trials so that our patient,
can have early access to those potentially
life saving treatments.
So those are two things that we are
trying to kind of, you know, make it
better and and, hopefully, the best.
Yeah. It kinda sounds like, you know, the
best of both worlds in those two focuses
of prevention and then and then those breakthroughs
in treatment that are so important as well.
You know, I cover oncology news for Becker's,
and I've slowly began to see clinical trials
play a bigger role in health system strategy.
What role do clinical trials play in your
plan at OSF,
particularly in that, treatment center that you were
just talking about? I'd love to kind of
get a peek behind the curtain there.
Sure. I think, you know, clinical trials,
by definition,
it includes both,
interventional
clinical trials
and also,
the correlated clinical trials. Now, primarily, we're focused
on intervention. It means that we provide new
treatments for our patients.
So let's say a patient is diagnosed with
cancer, come to my clinic.
If he or she is not interested in
any clinical trial,
or not eligible for any any clinical trials,
then we offer that patient what we call
standard of care.
So standard of care is basically those treatment
that is already proven to be efficacious and
safe and got FDA approval and is covered
by insurance.
So, therefore,
any oncologist that can prescribe the treatments and
a patient can get such therapy
in any treatment center.
Now kind of interesting that,
especially for oncology area,
all those,
new, standard of care,
it you know, it's a their approval is
based on previous,
successful clinical trials.
So in other words,
any new treatments
must have gone through rigorous,
you know, stages of clinical trials from phase
one,
then phase two, and quite often phase three
to demonstrate,
the treatment is really efficacious,
you know, and safe.
Therefore can get FDA approval. And after that,
that treatment becomes,
you know, standard of care. So from that
perspective, clinical trial is,
in fact, an essential and
indispensable
step,
before any treatment becomes, standard
care. But then at the same time,
imagine that for any treatment to get approval,
it takes many years. So if we do
have clinical trials,
then as I mentioned earlier, that we can
offer our patients
early access
to those potentially life saving treatments.
Now at the same time, from science perspective,
we know that
new targets,
new treatments, they develop in the laboratory set
laboratory setting by our scientists. I mean, sometimes
could be whole lifetime or many decades.
But, eventually, if we want to translate those
those discoveries
to benefit our patients,
all those things has to go through clinical
trials. So that's important. So clinical trials
that,
is valuable for our patients, and it's also
valuable for science in general.
Perfect.
So, you know, our,
our podcast audience,
they might come from an oncology background, but
they're also, you know, just
hospital and health system leaders across the country
who are, you know, tasked with making those
strategic decisions for the operations of their systems.
I'd love to know from your perspective what
mindset you feel,
you know, health system leaders should take when
it comes to supporting cancer research
or even beginning to operationalize
or expand cancer research programs
within their own organizations.
Do you have any advice for them?
Yeah. I think, you know, this is I
can share by personal kind of, you know,
insight.
I think there are a few,
principles we have to kind of pay attention
to. One is we've got to have a
mission, and I think this mission must be
patient centered or patient centric.
What is important? Because,
let's say if we have our beloved one
diagnosed with cancer. Right? From that moment, I
mean, the diagnosis of cancer is devastating. So
at a time when patient our patient, our
beloved one is diagnosed with cancer,
every day matters, and every hour matters. From
that perspective,
we want to introduce really effective treatment for
our patients. And now this can be through
a very good care,
using standard
care treatment, but also
innovative clinical trials makes much sense in the
setting.
We also want to translate really those, discovery
to to to innovative treatments for our patients
to benefit them as soon as possible, and
this is what we call translational imperative.
We want to really move all the discovery
to the clinical side as quickly as possible.
So I think with this patient centric mind,
the mission,
then we know the direction of doing research.
At the same time, you know, if we
are really focused on patients, not only we
bring new treatments, we're also going to conduct
research that pay attention to their,
the quality of life, their needs,
and then,
provide basically evidence based,
you know,
science to support those kind of decisions.
I'm glad to hear that, at OSF,
we don't
just call us, you know, employee, but we'd
rather call us mission partner.
So I think, you know, OSF well, this
is one of the reason that I came
to OSF is
that, it has its own mission really to
trying to
prevent or reduce any unnecessary sufferings
to save every single, patient. So we do
have the mission, and I think, you know,
this mission, especially patient centric,
will really help us to shape our research
direction. So I think this is number one.
Number two is, I think, you know, for
the research, we have to be innovative.
As I said, you know, best care using
serum treatment
is important, but at the same time, we
are dealing with a very challenging disease. This
is cancer.
Everybody's cancer is different, and and kind of
another challenging thing is any treatment we give
to cancer cells,
they will adapt. They have elasticity. They will
find a way to escape.
And because of that, we have to keep
chasing innovative treatments.
So that innovative,
treatments is supposed to be based on innovative
research,
and sometimes we have to have the guts
to take high risk, high rewarding, you know,
research program.
And I think the third is, I think
quite important is we have to be open
minded. And, you know, when we're taking care
of patients, we're conducting good research.
I think we should put less ego, you
know, in ourself.
We want collaborate with different mindsets. We want
to collaborate like, for example, as OSF, we
can collaborate with
academic centers. Like, you know, us, we have,
you know, UIC, UICAMP.
We have UIUC, those are academic centers.
We may also want to collaborate with other
hospitals.
We want to collaborate with industry
where we can develop or co develop, you
know, innovative clinical trials. At the same time,
we have to be open minded to all
sorts of new knowledge, new technology,
such as artificial intelligence, for example, how to
integrate this into, for example, clinical trials.
So, you know, I think keep open minded.
This will help us to keep learning.
I think those are three, costly pillars,
to, you know, to kind of ensure that
we have a successful research program.
Number one is always
patient centric mission. Number two is to be
innovative,
and number three is to be open minded
and collaborative.
Amazing. Yeah. I think that's, you know,
a perfect encapsulation,
I think, of of your strategy and then
also, you know, what other leaders can kind
of emulate and maybe repurpose for their own
organizations when it comes to supporting cancer research.
So I appreciate you laying it out,
so perfectly for us.
Whenever I speak with an oncologist, I always
like to ask them, you know, what excites
you most about the future of the oncology
field? I feel like my conversations with leaders
in oncology are also,
are always,
you know, extremely motivating and hopeful. So I'd
love to know from your perspective,
what are you most excited about in the
future?
Yeah. Exactly. I can tell you a lot.
So, man, I think, you know, I'm kind
of excited.
A few things. I think number one is
we're gonna see,
more novel treatments,
you know,
approved in a much faster pace. This is
based on,
you know, explosion of knowledge and technology, etcetera.
And I can give you some sort of
example.
In old days, I came to United States
in a year of 2000. So twenty five
years ago,
for any medicine,
just say, for lung cancer space, for any
chemotherapy drug to be approved,
we have to wait for fifteen to twenty
years.
For example, one of the most famous chemotherapy
drugs, cisplatin,
took about fifteen years to get approved.
The second, famous one, you know, paclitaxel,
took about twenty years to approved.
And then we we start having, you know,
targeted therapy based on better understanding of cancer
cells. And the first
target therapy in lung cancer field, I think
gefitinib,
took about fifteen years. So it's about same
same time as chemotherapy.
But then the next generation, which is osimodinib,
with our more in-depth understanding of molecular biology,
only, took about three years to get approved.
Wow. So you can see that we're gonna
see more, you know, more new drugs, more
efficacious drugs get approved in much faster pace.
In old days, it took on average about
twelve to fifteen years, but now it's about
six to seven years, so much faster pace.
And, of course, there is also improvement. For
example,
the regulation FDA regulation in old days is
kind of sequential, just, you know, a one
stand approach, but now you have different track.
You can have, you know, accelerated
approval. You can have prior to review different
approaches. We get medicine pretty much faster way
to benefit our patients.
So from that perspective,
we are,
you know, I cannot say that we can
completely get rid of cancer, that disease entity.
But for sure, we're gonna see more patients.
We're going to really prolong
patients'
life, and we're gonna improve their quality of
life.
I'm very confident,
and in fact, it's actually happening, we're able
to convert cancer really to a chronic disease,
such as something like hypertension, diabetes.
People get it. We cannot cure them, but
we are not scared about that. So I
think in one day and in fact, it's
actually happening now that we are converting cancer
to chronic disease.
So this is something that really exciting exciting
to
me. And and second, you know, all those
new treatment is based on new
knowledges. So now we see explosion of knowledge.
We not only we are having more, in-depth
understanding about cancer biology just based on cancer,
but we also harness power of our immune
system. For example, based on that, we have
immunotherapy.
And I tell you that immunotherapy, sometimes I'm
able to cure I'm talking about not just
treat. Sometimes I can cure a patient
with metastatic lung cancer
by immunotherapy.
So it's it's really amazing.
And then we have new technology, for example,
artificial intelligence,
which can help us to design drug in
a much faster way, smarter way.
Artificial intelligence can also simulate, you know, clinical
trials
so that we can test a hypothesis
in a much faster approach.
And artificial intelligence can interpret all those knowledge
base, the database, for example, the genome data,
the radiomics data, all sorts of things together
and kind of give us a better picture
of about
an individual's biology. And,
based on that, we can give a tailored
therapy.
And I think lastly,
even more exciting is that when in the
process, when we are looking
new treatments for cancer,
we got to understand better about the cancer
biology.
But then it's not only just cancer. Basically,
we also have to understand the biology of
normal cells.
For example, the normal immune cells, etcetera.
And in that, through that process, we actually
gain lots of knowledge. It's not only just
to conquer cancer,
but also to apply those knowledge to other,
you know, branches of medicine or other parts
of life science.
And because of this knowledge,
then we are,
get more how to say we're getting,
more benefits. And
in fact, we I I will say we
are able to have a better life and
hopefully a happier life. So this is the
most exciting part.
Perfect. Thank you so much. I always feel
so great when I hear,
cancer leaders speak about the future. So I
appreciate hearing from you. I would just like
to thank you again for joining me on
the podcast today. It's been such an amazing
and informative discussion.
And, again, I'm so appreciative of you for
sharing your time and your insights.
I invite our listeners to tune into more
podcasts from Becker's Healthcare
by visiting our podcast page at beckershospitalreview.com.
Thank you again, doctor Zhang, and I hope
you all have a wonderful rest of your
day.
Thank you for having me here today. Thank
you.