Ronny Allan

Ronny Allan is a 3 x award-winning accredited patient leader advocating internationally for Neuroendocrine Cancer and all other cancer patients generally. Check out his Social Media accounts including Facebook, BlueSky, WhatsApp, Instagram and and X.

Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy (PRRT) has been around for a while and doctors are learning all the time about the most likely candidates. Selection of candidates and predictions on who will benefit most are still not an exact science (….and possibly never will be). Neuroendocrine Neoplasms are a heterogenous grouping of cancers, and heterogeneity also includes (but is not limited to) age, stage, gender, functional/non-functional, and pre-existing condition constraints. All of this complicates the task of therapeutic decision-making and sequencing.

The attached cohort study aims to bound the issue and describe a method of allocating a Clinical Score (CS) to assist doctors and patients in their decision-making. According to the lead author, the CS is the initial prognostic score to help NET patients anticipate expected benefit from PRRT and is ready for use in the clinic (although the actual document does suggest it requires prospective confirmation from ongoing clinical trials).

This is progress.

Conclusions

This cohort study has found the Clinical Score (CS) to be the first validated clinical metric, to our knowledge, which can estimate the anticipated benefit from ¹⁷⁷Lu-dotatate for individual patients. Our study findings suggest that using ¹⁷⁷Lu-dotatate when patients are less pretreated and possess a lower degree of metastatic involvement may optimize treatment outcomes; this notion, however, requires prospective confirmation from ongoing clinical trials. Click on the heading below to read.

External Validation of a Clinical Score for Patients With Neuroendocrine Tumors Under Consideration for Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy | Oncology | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network (click here)

Original Investigation

Oncology

January 19, 2022

External Validation of a Clinical Score for Patients With Neuroendocrine Tumors Under Consideration for Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy

Satya Das, MD, MSCI¹; Aman Chauhan, MD²; Liping Du, PhD³; Katharine E. Thomas, MD⁴; Aasems Jacob, MD²; Aimee Schad, MD⁵; Shikha Jain, MD⁶; Aaron Jessop, MD, MBA⁷; Chirayu Shah, MD⁷; David Eisner, NP-C¹; Dana B. Cardin, MD, MSCI¹; Kristen K. Ciombor, MD, MSCI¹; Laura W. Goff, MD, MSCI¹; Marques Bradshaw, MD, MSCR⁷; Dominique Delbeke, MD, PhD⁷; Martin Sandler, MD⁷; Robert A. Ramirez, DO¹; Jordan Berlin, MD¹

Author Affiliations Article Information

¹Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee
²University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center, Lexington
³Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University of Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee
⁴Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology, Department of Medicine, Lousiana State University, New Orleans
⁵Department of Medicine, Rush Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois
⁶Department of Medicine, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago
⁷Department of Radiology, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee