Speaker 0: 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?

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 0: 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.

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 0: 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.

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 0: 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?

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 0: 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?

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 0: 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.

Speaker 1: Thank you for having me here today. Thank you.